Colette Kelleher (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I will be brief. It is clear from the CSO figures that children have borne the brunt of the mistakes we, as a country and as politicians, have made. We now have an opportunity to reverse that and we need to start with the 2,000 children who are homeless. I ask the Minister of State to enable us to be the eyes, ears and watchdog on behalf of those 2,000 children. The Combat Poverty Agency is no longer in existence but the Minister of State's Department has the ability to provide us with the monitoring information required. There are probably more than 2,000 children homeless today.We should be able to see what progress is being made on behalf of those 2,000 children to remove them from the unsuitable accommodation in which they currently live. It is robbing children of their here and now, their childhoods and their future. It is wasting money which is being spent on hotels and hostels and the money that will be spent on mental health for those children in the future. These are the very people who could end up in homeless hostels further down the line. There is going to be a cost to all this, but irrespective of the cost we are talking about human beings and lives. I would like the Minister of State to come back to us regularly to monitor the information about those 2,000 children and see if progress is being made. I do not care about the difficulties in local authorities or in his Departments. We need to be overcoming them and getting on with it.