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

With regard to public land being only for public housing, some of the sites we have as public land are huge. For example, the Central Mental Hospital site in Dundrum is massive.

I do not think it is fair that the people who would not be able to avail of a particular scheme would not be able to buy a new home that might be built there. As many as 2,500 new homes could be on that great site when it is finally developed and mix is important. These are two reasons I believe the policy we have currently on the approach to public land is important. We can debate the percentage of private versus public. I just think there should be some access to housing in those areas for people who will not be able to avail of the schemes for the different reasons we have set out in the regulations to date.

The important thing that we do as we lift the restrictions on the movement of people and we go through the phases is that we do not give up the additional accommodation that we have to date, so we can continue to have people being able to socially distance and to self-isolate should they be afraid they are sick or should they actually be sick and recovering. The accommodation needs to stay in place for a longer period than the initial emergency period.

The next thing that has to happen is that the health supports must remain in place. This is incredibly important. Yes, we have some NGOs that have trained up their own health staff but we have additional health supports on top of this and they will have to continue beyond the immediate emergency period.

We have continued to put in place Housing First and getting people off the streets and into their homes. At least 25 new such tenancies were created since the beginning of the crisis, with more we can do. Currently, rough sleeping is very low because of the extra work that outreach teams are doing to get people into care and keep them in care and because the experience some people are now having in emergency accommodation is better than what they might have had before the crisis because of the changes that have been made. This is why it is important that we identify these changes that we need to maintain.

With regard to testing people in emergency accommodation, what happened was the NGOs came together and agreed that one NGO would run a facility to take any suspected or confirmed case. It trained up its staff to work and be able to test and do everything necessary. It is running fantastically well. Thankfully, as a result of these efforts, we have not seen a cluster. What we have now moved to is targeted testing of people in emergency accommodation. The Deputy spoke about what happens in a private home that is overcrowded because of the number of people renting it and we have a similar measure. Where a fear might arise because one person is suspected of being sick or actually has the virus, we can do targeted testing of everyone else who might have been in that particular centre. This will be very beneficial. What we think we will find is a number of asymptomatic cases, where people never displayed a symptom of being sick for whatever reason. This is what is happening in testing in emergency accommodation.

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