Mary Fitzpatrick (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

We agree that it should be a requirement, there should be criteria and it should be in primary legislation. Moving on from that, I think we all agree that we should decouple social housing from the emergency accommodation situation. The emergency accommodation response should not be dependent on a person qualifying for permanent long-term social housing. I acknowledge that my experience is focused on Dublin city. Dublin City Council is the largest local authority and it responds to the greatest demand for emergency accommodation, so I suspect it is better at it. In terms of an appeals process, it is an informal appeal. Elected representatives like myself, as well as organisations such as Crosscare, Threshold and others, will advocate when there is a case but that needs to be fixed in the other local authorities where the staff may not have been trained or equipped to respond as effectively as they should.

On EU and human rights laws, I take the point made. We will ask the Department officials to ensure that what they are bringing forward has been sanity checked. In addition, we will put to them the points our guests have made.