Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

First, I thank Deputy Howlin for the way in which he raised this question because it is easy to be emotive when one is talking about children who are homeless for understandable reasons.

I was the Minister who made a decision to invest heavily in family hubs out of necessity at the time. We had, and still have, far too many children and families in hotels and bed and breakfast accommodation. I felt we could do something better than that as a temporary measure for people while they are in a transition from the crisis of homelessness to permanent social housing or some other rental accommodation or other form of permanent accommodation.

We have invested well over €100 million in trying to put tailor-made infrastructure in place to support families as best we can in what are effectively family hostel-type accommodation where we try to cater for the broader needs of families, whether that is through homework clubs, play space, separate cooking facilities and separate washing facilities. We have counselling services in some of the hubs to help people make the transition more quickly into social housing, in terms of application forms and all the other things that need to be done.

I have visited many of these family hubs. Of course, they are not ideal for permanent accommodation, but they are not meant to be. They are meant to be a temporary arrangement that can support families, as best we can. We need to ensure that we, in what we say here and outside, do not contribute to the stigma, shame, concern, frustration and anger that many young people feel by having to be in such a hub, hotel, or bed and breakfast accommodation. We need to focus on making sure that we transition families and children out of this type of accommodation as quickly as possible. We have a target turnaround time of six months for family hubs. Families transition far quicker out of hubs than out of hotels, and there are reasons for that.

This is a temporary arrangement while we put in place the necessary capacity, in particular, in terms of social housing, to ensure that we do not have family homelessness in Ireland any longer in the not too distant future. In the meantime, we must have infrastructure that is designed to do as much as we can for children and families who are in this crisis-vulnerable situation and, therefore, I would defend the policy of family hubs.

By the way, I would not disagree with some of the recommendations that have been made here. I would have no problem with independent inspection, for example. We already have a national quality standards framework for homeless services that is applied across Dublin which, I understand, will be extended across the country.

We need to make sure that there is a consistency of service delivery across the family hubs. They are currently operated by Focus Ireland, Crosscare, Good Shepherd, Peter McVerry Trust, Respond, The Salvation Army and Sophia housing, all of which are good organisations that the State is partnering with here to constantly improve services.

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