Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

While many of these measures are welcome, and Sinn Féin has welcomed them publicly, none of them address the specific question I put to the Minister. We have a situation right now in the city of Dublin that when a family including children presents as homeless there is not enough emergency accommodation and these people are sent away to telephone hotels to try to find emergency accommodation for themselves. These are low income families under a huge amount of stress, who often have no telephone credit, and they are pushed out of the system.

We also have a situation where growing numbers of young families with children are being turned away by the local authority and deemed ineligible for emergency accommodation. This is not through the fault of the local authority but because there is not enough emergency accommodation in the system. Focus Ireland's intake team did some research. In April, 35 families were turned away by local authorities in the city of Dublin, and more than half of these were subsequently deemed to have an urgent need for emergency accommodation. Last Tuesday, ten families were turned by local authorities and some of them were not accommodated until 12.30 a.m. or 1.30 a.m., including a young mother with a four month old child.

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