Dr. Mary Murphy:

I apologise that we cannot fully engage in everything. I will address the comments on the family hubs raised by Deputy Ó Broin, Senators Boyhan and O'Sullivan, the Chairman and others. We have been accused of being emotive and disingenuous. Our job was to go in as academics to look hard at what we saw and use the academic literature and international research to try to understand the situation and to take a long-term view of what we saw. It is very clear the State is between a rock and a hard place. Homeless families are between even sharper rocks and sharper hard places. We have been absolutely clear that the family hubs provide a safer environment to live in than emergency accommodation, hotels or hostels. We are absolutely clear about that. That does not mean they are not problematic and that the longer a family is living in them, the more they are subject to the damage caused by institutionalising their family life, by deteriorating their capacity to parent effectively and reducing the opportunity for child well-being and development to happen as it normally would. All the international research says not to do this. All the international research says the longer families are in it, the more damaging it is. We want people to hear this. We are not being disingenuous.

We understand the pressure on the State to provide something that is not emergency hotel accommodation. We would, like everybody else in the room, prefer that it was housing and we are stressing the need to build those houses. In the meantime, if the State is reverting to an emergency policy response of using family hubs, it has an obligation to those families to mitigate the potential damage. It can only do that by legislating for timeframes so families will not be in them long term. It can only do it by having a sunset clause on the long-term use of these places by the State. It must have operational guidelines informed not only by child protection guidelines, which are absolutely essential, but also by other guidelines on family well-being and parental autonomy.

There are lots of examples of best practice where families have to live in emergency accommodation. There are other actors the State can draw in. All the academics, including Irish academics, such as Paula Mayock, point to this. IHREC has looked at it and pointed to it as well. Things such as operational guidelines and systems of rights and redress are important. There must also be systems whereby the residents in these places have participation rights and the power to inform the policy on how the places will be run as well as an inspection and regulatory regime. We suggest it is the responsibility of the Dublin Region Homeless Executive.

A new national homeless agency was also announced in the early feedback on the Rebuilding Ireland review. There is obviously potential there. The Minister for Children and Youth Affairs clearly has a role to play as well. It is understandable why these places have evolved. We spent time in them and we respect the work being done in them. We know what are the aspirations of the families in them. When we did the research, we also saw that the longer term reality of living in these places, even over a ten-week period, was that the families' mental health and capacity to make their lives work for them began to really deteriorate. This is very real and we are not being disingenuous. We are clearly saying they are better than some of the other alternatives but we need to take seriously that they really cannot be long term. The only way we will be satisfied they will not be long term is if there are legal guarantees that they are not long term. Legislation and a regulatory framework is required or those families run the risk of being left there for very long periods of time. We make no apologies for the language we used and the historical examples we offered to stress the point we make.

I will make another point very quickly because I know we are constrained by time. Deputy Pat Casey and Deputy Richard Boyd Barrett raised the issue of the rights-based approach. I have offered one example of a rights-based approach and the need for a regulatory framework with legislative guidelines for the operation of the family hubs. We are talking about a broader constitutional campaign on the right to housing. We are asking whether it would make a real difference. I think the difference it would make would be subtle. It is not a panacea. It would not solve anything overnight but in terms of the power imbalance that exists, it is worth having. Beth Watts's research is very clear. Not only does it have the capacity to shift the power narrative and the discourse I talked about, but when there are competing policy objectives, the right to housing as a clear policy priority in the context of competing objectives can take away vetoes that exist to the right to housing.

If you give the right to housing, you at least equalise those two competing rights. You make it different. It also raises issues of rights, voice and participation. The other issue it raises, that does not get enough attention but I think it is important, concerns the context of the fiscal deficit and expenditure thresholds that are now being used as an international veto on expenditure on increasing the budget for social housing bills. There was examples during the crisis where countries that had strong constitutional rights provisions for social policy in their constitutions were able legally to contest some of the fiscal rules that were given to them by the European Union. Germany, Portugal and Latvia did it. Having these provisions in our Constitution over the longer term gives us more national power as a sovereign to contest some of the fiscal frameworks that are stopping us from doing what we might otherwise want to do as a nation. I think that is a very powerful argument that is probably not getting enough examination in the debate to date. There are many reasons to pursue a right to housing in the Constitution. As I have said, it is not a panacea and nobody should argue that it is the answer. It is part of a suite of actions that are needed, but it certainly gives some tools that might be very useful both in the short and long term.