Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The Taoiseach may have received an email from Peter McVerry today pointing out that seven individuals have died sleeping rough in the past 12 weeks, which is both unprecedented and shameful. There is the shocking fact that 3,000 children are in emergency accommodation. Peter McVerry is asking for very specific things to respond to this. Will the Taoiseach agree to what he is asking for? He wants a formal assessment of the number of people sleeping rough carried out by local authorities; local authorities to provide a dedicated phone number for members of the public who can identify people sleeping rough in their areas so that help can be given to them; each local authority to have a dedicated rough sleeper response team with transport to cover out-of-hours periods; a commitment that rough sleeping would be ended completely by 2018 which he points out that requires between 250 and 300 people to be housed through the Housing First programme; and that each local authority draw up a Housing First plan to house rapidly and offer intensive case management to recently housed former rough sleepers. Will the Taoiseach agree to that?

I want the Taoiseach to reconsider the comments he made earlier about the problems of big social housing estates. This is the excuse for not delivering the scale of public housing we need on the public housing land that we have. Problems generated in social housing estates are not because of anything intrinsic to social housing estates. They are to do with the lack of infrastructure put into estates built in the past. We need large scale provision of council housing with the infrastructure and services but that cannot be an excuse for not delivering the scale of public housing we need to address this crisis.

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