Ms Catherine McGuigan:

I shall set a little bit of context in the few minutes allocated to me. The Age Friendly Ireland programme, as members will probably be aware, over the past eight to nine years has provided a network of age-friendly county and city programmes in order to consider the ageing demographic and respond to the needs to older people. The first programme started in County Louth and, to date, there are 31 age-friendly programmes located across the country. The Age Friendly Ireland programme is hosted by Meath County Council as part of shared services on an interim basis and it is co-ordinating that response. The committee will have been given a copy of my presentation in advance. The members can see on the screens in front of them a snapshot of some of the initiatives that have been responsive to the current needs of older people.

Over the past nine years we have consulted about 20,000 older people. We have also carried out a national baseline and I will outline a few statistics in a minute or two. I wish to briefly state that there are two kinds of needs when it comes to housing for older people. First, the current needs of the ageing demographic. They face challenges like retrospective builds in terms of housing and customising or adapting houses to their needs. Second, there are future generations. If we are serious about providing housing for older people then we must consider sustainability and lifetime adaptability so that now, with the forthcoming tranche of housing, we can put universality into them. That would mean houses would no longer need to be retrospectively downsized to meet the needs of an ageing population. The members will be pleased to hear from me and all of my colleagues in other organisations that there are loads of opportunities and examples of how that can happen across the country.

We have an ageing population. Older people want to remain in their own homes and access to services. They do not want to transition into residential care unnecessarily. They want to transition and for houses to be adapted to their needs as they age. Such a viewpoint is substantiated by our national baseline. We conducted such research with the Department of Health and it was called the healthy and positive aging baseline. It was carried across 21 local authority areas. The initiative was conducted in partnership with the Health Service Executive, HSE, Age Friendly Ireland, the Department of Health and Atlantic Philanthropies. The fieldwork was carried out, and we developed 76 indicators, which are aligned to the national positive ageing strategy and the World Health Organization's Global Network for Age-Friendly Cities and Communities.

I have given a snapshot but I can supply the committee with a full version of the composite report, which is national baseline data. In terms of current issues, some people are empty nesters and want to downsize.

There are problems with housing maintenance and housing conditions. There are many services within the community, such as care and repair schemes and befriending programmes, that can respond to those issues but, critically, there are still many people who do not know what is available to them. Even fuel poverty and the like are continuing issues.

The next slide concerns housing attitudes and it substantiates what I have said. What do older people in Ireland want? After consulting with this number of people and the national baseline, older people want to remain living in their own homes and as part of their communities, but not necessarily in their current housing conditions. That could be because they can no longer get up the stairs or there might be obstacles to that. The top thing they do not want to do is transition into residential care or even to move in with family. They want to retain their independence for as long as possible. They would like financial help with their bills. Some older people were not able to keep their house warm in the past 12 months and some of them had to go without heating. They would be people who are living in three or four bedroom houses. They need to live in appropriate accommodation that is warm. We have some great examples and, as I explained to the clerk to the committee, we have examples that are currently being devised in a policy document. There is Colivet Court in Limerick, the Great Northern Haven, which members will hear about today, and Nás na Ríogh Housing Association. There are many different housing case studies which members can examine after the meeting.

The next slide is the four components of housing. When one thinks of housing, one thinks of bricks and mortar but it is so much more than that. Obviously, there are the physical things and the opportunity for the committee is to look at lifetime adaptability, housing options and retrospectively to look at things such as the housing adaptation grants. However, there is also access to clinical care and to social services, whether it is a visit to the library, a home help or local transportation. The emerging aspect is technological. We need to look at technology in the home to be able to make our homes more sustainable.

I will finish up in terms of the policy context. From our perspective, the Age Friendly Ireland programme is hosted by local government and works with all the key Departments. There are two actions in the Rebuilding Ireland: Action Plan for Housing and Homelessness. One is that the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government and the Department of Health would work on a joint draft policy. We were invited to participate in that and we were able to provide our housing research which looks at all the core components of good housing - location, place making, use of brown field sites and housing allocations. We are looking at the broader context of not just social housing, but housing for everybody, including owner-occupier. That policy is being developed and I understand it will be published and launched shortly.

We provide housing and public realm training and have rolled it out to architects, engineers and planners across the 31 local authorities. We will continue to roll that out to approved housing bodies and private developers. It is a priority for the future that people are made aware of what the challenges are and, perhaps, to debunk the myth that it is hugely more costly. It will cost more to build one's house in an age friendly way if one wants it to be sustainable, but it does not have to be so much that it would deter people. It is certainly more costly not to do it. That is the argument. We have also provided recommendations for county development plans across the 31 local authorities and we have worked with the national planning framework to ensure the principles and awareness of the ageing demographic are translated into that framework.

That is an overview of some of the resources we have developed over the past few years. I sent them to the clerk of the committee to be circulated to the members. The age friendly principle is based on the fact that if one designs for the young, one excludes the old, and if one designs for the old, one includes everybody. Sustainable and inclusive communities and housing options are key to building a sustainable, age friendly country.