Eoghan Murphy (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputies for their questions. What we are seeing, as this is emerging, is a mixed practice in each local authority as to both what they are counting but also some of the provisions they are putting in place to prevent people from going into emergency accommodation. At the Second Housing Summit at the beginning of year I told the local authorities to be creative in preventing families and individuals from having to access emergency accommodation. We know the tenuous nature of that with individuals going from day to day, night to night, not knowing where they will be living, and staying in hostels, hubs, hotels and emergency accommodation. I asked that they keep families and individuals out of emergency accommodation but to be creative with the solutions they put in place. What we have seen is that some families and individuals have been accommodated in local authority housing, some have been housed in the private rental sector with HAP support, and some have stayed in private rented accommodation which they were renting themselves but they were at risk of homelessness. The local authority provided supports and therefore they never entered into emergency accommodation and yet because it was section 10 funding, they were counted as being in emergency accommodation but they should not have been.

I was glad to hear Deputy Ó Broin recognise the fact that there has been a miscategorisation error here. We are trying to get to the bottom of the scale of this. We do not know exactly when it occurred. That is why we cannot measure, with any accuracy at the moment, the kind of increase we might have seen from February to March because we do not know exactly when those miscategorisations occurred. However, we will get that information and when I have it, I will publish it. We are talking about 247 adults and 331 dependants who have already been taken out of the figures, but I am aware there may be as many as 200 more. The Deputy might have heard me say in the region of 600 to 800. We are trying to work through that currently.

By the way, no one was removed by me from these figures. This was an agreement between my officials and the local authorities once we discovered that people were in homes with their own keys and front door, some for as long as two years. They were being counted as being in the same situation as someone who is in a hostel who has to go out and walk the streets every day. That is not case here. If we want to help people who are in emergency accommodation or people experiencing this crisis, we need to understand exactly who is there and the reason they are there. We are counting some people, including people from Tallaght Cross who have not been taken out of the numbers, but if some people are in a situation where they might have been in their own home with their own key and front door for two years, that is not emergency accommodation. If they are not at risk of going into emergency accommodation, they are not in emergency accommodation. They are in a home, and it may not be their forever home. In some instances, the home did become their HAP tenancy but they will not be going into emergency accommodation. They will be going into a home from a home.

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