Mr. Colm Campbell:

On State funding for ONE, at the moment it takes a little short of €1 million in non-capital funding per annum to run ONE. Our accounts are online on our website. I think it was €968,000 last year for non-capital funding but that did not include the costings for Cobh. We currently get €100,000 from the Department of Defence. We recently applied for an increase in that but it would be wrong to comment on that as it was only recently.

Our Dublin hostel, Brú na bhFiann in Smithfield, gets partly funded by the Dublin Regional Homeless Executive which, as the committee knows, runs the homeless sector on behalf of the four councils in Dublin. We get approximately €270,000 or €280,000 per annum from it. One of our counsellors is paid for by the HSE, as I mentioned, so that is €45,000 per annum for that counsellor. That is the State funding, give or take, and then we raise the rest of it ourselves through fundraising, membership fees and donations. Our residents all pay for their keep as well. It is very important to say that because we are preparing our residents to move into permanent accommodation and one of the key things there is to make sure they look after themselves properly, look after the rooms they are given properly and pay for their keep. They must get used to looking after themselves. I hope that answers Deputy Brady's question on funding

As we said, we believe that the creation of an office of veterans' affairs, similar in construct to the office of emergency planning in Agriculture House, is central to not just creating a veterans' policy but to delivering on whatever that policy is. As I said earlier, most of the issues that we come up against are not defence-related. They are issues of housing and health. Those are the two key issues we come up against all the time. Mr. O'Connor and I then have to try to find contacts in that regard. That would be much better done if we had somewhere to go, such as a single point of contact where we could go if we had an issue in health and the person in the office of veterans' affairs would get onto his or her contact in the Department of Health and try to resolve that. In the last few weeks we have had meetings with the HSE, Cork County Council and the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage. We are not experts in these areas and we have to find those contacts. They are great once we meet them but it could be better facilitated by having this office of veterans' affairs. I think we are making progress on it, to answer Deputy Brady's question. We met with the Secretary General of the Department of Defence quite recently on this matter and we also met with the Commission on the Defence Forces. We brought up one single issue with it and that was the veterans' policy. That commission is reporting next month.

I am hopeful it will report favourably in that regard. The figure of 60 beds nationwide is just from experience. Mr. O’Connor probably has more information on that than I would.