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

I thank Deputy Jan O'Sullivan for tabling this valuable legislation for our consideration. I am happy to hear it will be supported by the Government. This is not just a theoretical piece of legislation, it will have a real, practical impact. The Deputy outlined some of the families she has dealt with in her constituency and elsewhere who have been affected by the lack of protection, the addressing of which this legislation will now provide.

We all have experience of dealing with families who have presented as homeless seeking emergency accommodation who have been split up either, as the Deputy outlined, where children are left with extended family members or the two partners are split up and sent to opposite sides of the city with children split up, sometimes for lengthy periods of time. That idea that the law would recognise the family unit is quite important in tackling that particular problem.

The Minister's description of what happens when a family presents as homeless is not the experience that many families on a daily basis live through. That is not to say this is not way it should be or is not the way it is for many families, but many people are coming to us telling us that their experience is different. It is important that the Minister hears that and acknowledges it.

There are many families who present and are told when they present that there is no emergency accommodation, and that is when they present early in the day and often day after day for several weeks on end. They are given a list of hotels and told to self-accommodate. To add to the stress of, for example, reaching a notice to quit date, they have to then ring a long list of hotels, day after day, to try to find emergency accommodation. If they have nowhere to go that night, they have to ring the freefone number. As the Minister is aware, on any given night, the freefone service might not be able to provide emergency accommodation, or the family might be genuinely fearful of the type of emergency accommodation they might end up with, late on a night, particularly in this city. The in-take service will also advise that, on occasions, they have placed families in emergency accommodation and then the Dublin Regional Homeless Executive or the local authority after several days has instructed the in-take team to cease the payment for that family and they are then back out of the hotel.

There is a problem for some of these families - I am not saying it is for all or for the majority of them - which needs to be addressed. There is also a case of increasing numbers of young families who have lost private rental accommodation, have then gone into extended family accommodation where stress and strains force them out of that, and when they present to the emergency accommodation section of the local authorities they are simply sent away and not even given the options that I have just outlined. There is an increasing trend of people coming from the extended family overcrowded stressful situation who have been turned away. That is also creating a problem.

It is very timely that we are having this general discussion on homelessness because it has been a very bad number of days for the public debate on homelessness, particularly from the point of view of the Government and State agencies. The comments of the chair of the Housing Agency and the director of the Dublin Regional Homeless Executive are deeply unfortunate and have caused a real level of hurt among people in emergency accommodation and people who have experienced homelessness, and we heard some of that today, but, more worryingly, the idea that, for example, homelessness will always be with us or that homelessness is the result of bad behaviour displays a set of values which I thought were long gone from our understanding of homelessness and homeless services.

This betrays a Victorian attitude that somebody's being homeless is a result of their own decisions, bad lifestyle choices or character, as opposed to the result of a housing system that is designed in a particular way and cannot meet the needs of various groups of people.

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