Kathleen Funchion (Carlow-Kilkenny, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

On my way up from Kilkenny today, I was listening to a number of news reports on children and young people describing their family and living situation in hubs and bed and breakfast accommodation as like being in prison. As a society, we have completely failed when young people are describing their living arrangements as being like prison. I honestly do not know how many debates we have to have in this Chamber. I said the exact same thing last year about how many debates we will have before the Government realises that this has gone beyond a crisis and an emergency situation given the number of homeless people and the really negative impact this is having on children and young people and on their mental health, on how they see themselves in the world and on their self esteem. They describe themselves as being ashamed and embarrassed and it is not good enough. To be honest, I really do not think the Minister gets it because if he did, he would be doing a lot more about it.

I have very limited time so I want to talk in particular from the education point of view of kids going to school who are forced to live in emergency accommodation. We know that one in every four primary schools has children who are experiencing homelessness and teachers are at the forefront in dealing with the impact of this on the children they are teaching. Where a school has identified a homeless child in a class, it is not the duty of the teacher or school alone to cater for that child. The State must recognise that teachers and schools in these instances must be better resourced and provided with additional wrap around supports to assist homeless students, particularly those undertaking exams, where suitable study spaces and accommodation are critical to their outcomes. They must be able to draw on additional financial supports to provide for the needs of students such as transport, school books and uniforms. Where homelessness has been identified they should be able to provide meals, homework clubs and supervised study. This would tackle the issue of no access to study time or study spaces which Focus Ireland highlights. While not justifying this situation, because when we talk about services we are sometimes justifying the homeless situation, let us at least make it a little bit better for those children who are forced into that situation.

Another measure that we should look at, which has not been explored enough, even though it is often mentioned by Ministers when they speak about the supports that are available for children, is the school completion programme. Its funding has been cut over the last ten years and it has not been increased. It provides a great service to many children and if that programme was better resourced and better financed, it would be able to do an awful lot more. We also cannot just rely on classifying the children who are in the DEIS schools for supports. There are homeless children all over the country, not only in DEIS schools, so we need to ensure that the supports are following the children but at the end of the day, we need to build homes and we need to look at any sort of emergency measures that can be put in place in terms of compulsory purchase orders, CPOs, on properties.

We have to stop talking about this situation in this Chamber and stop normalising it. We have to create solutions. Countless solutions have been put forward. There was a cross-party committee in 2016 on the housing and homelessness situation where we had all-party agreement on many different measures. Let us start implementing some of these. We are constantly told it is not an issue of funding, so if it is not, let us start putting the measures in place. Three years down the road, the situation is getting worse.

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