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

I thank the Deputy for his questions. No doubt there will be lessons that Departments can share with others. We have experts working in health, in homelessness, in care provision, in different types of treatments, and in the provision of food, all of these things. It is one of the benefits we have in the public sector, in that there is real expertise there and they really have led the way. I think back to the end of January and February and a lot of people were sceptical about what Covid-19 might mean in reality and if it could ever come here. Thankfully, the experts working in homelessness, in the Dublin Region Homeless Executive and in the NGOs, whether they were sceptical or not, put plans in place. It is absolutely the case that those plans have saved lives and, in addition, they have vastly improved the experience of a lot of people who are in emergency accommodation or sleeping rough.

As the Deputy rightly points out, we need now to understand how we can keep that new reality, make it the new norm and not go back to how things were being done before. Sometimes in a crisis one gets the opportunity to move much more quickly than one might otherwise do. Bureaucratic walls fall away. The Taoiseach talked about this when we had the engagement in Grangegorman.

When one goes to design policy, one often wants to design the perfect policy but it gets in the way of something good that might help people more quickly. I am thinking of the interagency group which we set up has been doing great work since 2017; some of the things that we wanted to achieve happened almost overnight because of this crisis. It should never have taken a crisis for that to happen, but it did and we should take advantage of that and see what we can make permanent.

On things we might keep in place, earlier I mentioned a dedicated health support for Dublin which was not there. It has been absolutely fantastic. People were sharing videos which were helping to instruct staff how to deal with people who they suspected might have Covid in a congregated setting, and so on. We have to maintain dedicated health supports and it is clear that there must be a funding line for them from the Department of Health. We could be clear about that. We could look at the housing support and say the funding in the housing budget will get X amount of accommodation at X price and that health support funding will get X number of care workers to come in and do this work; to really have that aligned. We have to break down some of those bureaucratic walls that have existed for too long.

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