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

It is all very interesting, but none of it answered any of the questions I asked so I will go through them again. What we all want to hear is not the aspiration because we support that. What we want to know is specific information, as follows. How many of the 1,239 families recorded in emergency accommodation are in hotels, and of those in hotels how many does the Minister expect to have housed by his target date? Will the Minister give a commitment here today that none of these families will be moved from hotels into other forms of emergency accommodation, even if that other form of accommodation is better than hotels? We are looking for a clear guarantee these families will be moved into tenancies of the type described by the Minister. Will the Minister also give a commitment that as he is developing these family hubs no attempt will be made, for example, to take a hotel and reclassify it as a family hub?

4 o’clock

The facility the Minister talked about in north County Dublin, being run by Respond! Housing Association, is a good quality facility. I want to hear the Minister say specifically that there will be no attempt to reclassify hotels as anything other than that. Are there timelines in his discussions with managers, particularly for Dublin local authorities? How many families does the Minister hope to have out of hotel accommodation this month, next month and the month after? We support this recommendation but the worry many of us have is that it is not going to be met. We would like to get more information as to how the Minister plans to meet it over the period from now until June.

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