Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for his response. I will make just a couple of comments by way of reply and make a number of requests for him to raise with both the line Minister and also, possibly, with his colleagues who have responsibility for healthcare.

First, in respect of Housing First, the Minister of State is absolutely correct in that both the report and Government policy recognise the importance of Housing First. The difficulty is that the target for Housing First exits from homelessness has only been increased by 50 per year to 250. We have 3,000 single adults in our emergency accommodation system at present, not all of whom have the very high level of complex needs that we are talking about, but many do. Some 250 Housing First placements a year are nowhere near adequate. In many cases the support services being provided are not being adequately funded for long enough. That is important because there is a period of vulnerability for people who are going into Housing First in the period of time immediately after exiting either street homelessness, sofa-surfing or emergency accommodation because, in many cases, they are removed from what was their support and contacts network, and from their cultural capital. In many instances in other jurisdictions, that actually leads to an increase in potential mortality during that period of vulnerability and that needs to be addressed.

I welcome the fact that the Health Research Board is undertaking this work but I understand that it was meant to start this two years ago and it would be good to hear from the Minister for Health at some point about its progress.

Crucially, one of the great innovations that was made by the Dublin Region Homeless Executive and Dr. Austin O’Carroll during the Covid-19 period was the creation of medically supported shielding units, where those with the highest level of vulnerability to contract Covid-19 and, therefore, potential death, were put into new bespoke units. Not only were they protected from Covid-19, something I wish to commend the Government, the DRHE and the front-line staff on achieving, but what happened when we put these people into own-door accommodation? All aspects of their lives started to improve, not just their protection from Covid-19 but their physical and mental health, and addiction management also. These were temporary facilities and one of the things that the Government should urgently consider in the context of this debate is the making of permanent facilities as transitional accommodation, rather than moving people back into emergency accommodation.

I thank the Minister of State for his response urgent and I urge him to raise this very serious matter with the two line Ministers. I hope that we can return to this issue at a later stage for a further update. I thank the Ceann Comhairle.

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