Dr. Mary Murphy:

In our report, we wanted to draw attention to the reality of life in emergency homeless accommodation and the emerging family hubs. We concentrated in particular on the emerging family hubs because we have a concern that these are seen as a panacea and a solution - albeit a temporary one - to the situation in which families in emergency hotel accommodation find themselves.

Our research found that while the family hubs are better than hotels, especially from a safety perspective - families told us they felt safer there - there are still a lot of shortfalls around the capacity of families to live any kind of normal family life in the family hubs. Families are restricted in their capacity to parent and child development is restricted along with child well-being. Education and employment is restricted and the maintenance of family and social networks is restricted. Anything that one might care to name becomes very difficult to do. To some degree, it is more difficult in a family hub than in a hotel because when one tries to maintain a regulatory environment that respects child protection guidelines, one is forced to put in a fairly strict regime of co-living. That strict regime of co-living restricts people's capacity to live what we would might think of as a normal day; there are a lot of rules and regulations. People feel they are under surveillance and they feel their lives are very controlled by the institutionalised system in which they are living. There is a sense that it adds up to therapeutic incarceration whereby people are institutionalised and their capacity to function by themselves is curtailed and narrowed.

Ireland has a long, sad history of institutionalised responses to gendered forms of poverty and exclusion. We need only think of the Magdalen laundries and direct provision in this regard. Our real fear is that even with the best of intentions we may again be setting the State up with a system of institutionalised response to a social policy problem that will dig in and be with us for decades. We are sounding strong warning bells in that respect.

It is very clear that even with the best response, as Dr. Hearne has outlined, this housing crisis will not be solvable in the next five or six years and these families are going to be there for a longer term. It really worries us that there is not much sign or evidence that the State is taking seriously its obligation to these families over that longer period. We do not see a plan to minimise the potential long-term damage that can happen to families when they are in such institutionalised settings, be they hotels or family hubs.

We would like to see a much more definitive policy. Why are we using family hubs? What is the policy rationale? What is the funding? What are the operational guidelines? What is the regulatory framework? What is the monitoring? What are the rights of the families in those hubs and how are those rights enabled? What is the redress when there are problems? What are the safeguards to make sure they are not pushed, in a very coercive regime, sanctioned or penalised for failing to meet these rules we have been speaking about. There is an awful lot more work to be done to explain the policy rationale behind family hubs and to minimise the potential long-term damage when families find themselves living there.

We caution that what we are seeing in this context is between that and a harder discourse beginning to emerge around families being too choosy in the context of whether they take up social housing offers. We see a variety of different types of comments being made that add up to a sense that families are coming to be seen as the problem and not the structural issue of housing shortages. That is really the problem.

Our fear is that over the next couple of years we will see families being blamed for the problem of homelessness rather than the shortage of social housing being identified as the structural problem we need to fix. For that reason, we really do believe that we need to keep the spotlight on the need to make sure there are legislative obligations on the State to eradicate the problem of family homelessness. That can be translated into small statutory instruments, such as time limits on the use of family hubs or sunset legislation that would require the State to dissolve the use of institutionalised responses to family homelessness within a certain timeframe, for example by 2020. There are various ways of setting out legislative guarantees to make sure that family homelessness stays on the agenda and is managed out of the system. We believe none of this will happen without a larger attempt to recognise that we are talking about serious power inequalities in this regard. We are talking about a housing market dominated by big financial actors, increasingly international financial companies and financial speculators, and we are talking about a relatively conservative approach to interpreting the right to property in the 1937 Constitution. That, alongside powerful political and media narratives, make people accept the market as an almost inevitable natural response to housing and we would argue that the cognitive lock of the market being seen as the primary vehicle to redress the housing problem, which is beginning to be edged out gradually, really needs to be broken much more forcefully in the political discourse.

We believe there is much merit to stressing a strong rights-based approach to housing as a way of breaking that strong narrative of the market being the only solution. The economic and social rights campaign had brought the case for a right to housing in the Constitution to the Constitutional Convention. We still argue that this could be useful. Beth Watts makes the point that when one has a rights-based approach, it allows one to find a priority when there are competing policy objectives. For example, it is often said that we do not want to build large social housing complexes because they recreate social housing problems of the past. That is put up as the reason the State needs to be timid about its response to building social housing. We argue that if a right to housing was embedded, the right of a person to housing would trump the other kind of policy objections that exist to forcefully taking on board a strong social housing building programme, so it also-----