Senator Browne has asked me for a few minutes of my time and I am quite delighted to facilitate him. Senator Browne is anxious to speak on this issue since he has a direct interest in the area. The fact that I have raised this issue is not to be interpreted as an attempt to score points off my colleagues from that constituency. I have too many friends in that constituency, and I come from the nearest big town to Carlow.
The history of the problem of homeless people in Carlow goes back to a policy change in 1969 which I outlined last week at great length in another debate and I do not want to repeat myself too much. That was a change of policy with regard to the functions and roles of what were then called the county homes, whereby it was recognised by the committee investigating these issues that county homes were no place for what were called "casuals" and "casual homeless people". Consequently, there has been a tendency to reduce the provision for casuals in county homes around the country. The best information available suggests that 53 per cent of county homes have either closed or reduced their provision for single, homeless people in the period since 1969, of which 27 per cent have closed entirely.
In the course of the research which went into developing those figures, a particularly extreme example came up in Carlow. It was extreme in the sense that it appeared that the responsibility for provision for homeless people, which is placed upon the shoulders of health boards, was not being discharged at all in what is by any standard a large inland urban area, having a population of the order of 20,000 people, a town with which I am intimately familiar.
I do not want to say that Carlow is worse than anywhere else in the country, but there is not a lot of information available about this problem of homelessness outside our major urban areas. Consequently, what information is available we have to use. Unfortunately, perhaps, for Carlow, the one place that information in detail seems to be available on the direct consequences of the closure of the provision for homeless people is Carlow. In 1980 the St. James's ward of the Sacred Heart Home, the one traditionally set aside for the single homeless, was closed. The closure followed a disturbance in the shelter which resulted in hospital staff requiring the assistance of local gardaí. I have to say that for anybody running a shelter for homeless people, who usually include some people who drink, the occurrence of a disturbance is not something that would be regarded as being of earth-shattering importance. Most of us dealing with people who have suffered so many of the burdens of life have come to recognise that these people have understandable grievances and a high level of anger. Consequently, we would not regard that as a justification for closing anything. Nevertheless, it was decided to do so.
It was rough on the people who ran that particular institution in Carlow to have to run a place for homeless people. The difficulty is that what was meant and what was stated at the time to be a closure for a week is now a closure for three years. I regret that it is because of what seems to me to be a miasma of confusion between statutory and voluntary organisations, and a complete distortion of the understood role of voluntary organisations, that I am compelled to raise it here.
A voluntary group in Carlow, the Carlow Christian Care Group, contacted an organisation with which I am connected and identified eight to ten people sleeping rough in Carlow. In spite of the fact that the shelter had been closed about two-and-a-half years, ten of the people who had been rendered homeless by that decision had still chosen to sleep rough in Carlow.
A question was put in the Dáil early in 1983 to the Minister for Health about the consequences of closing county home facilities. The Minister said he was not aware of any hardship resulting from it. Ministers use the phrase "I am not aware" in a way which stretches the English language somewhat, but Ministers have so many burdens on their shoulders that we forgive them stretching the English language. "I am not aware" does not mean "I do not know". It means "It has not been officially presented to me in a form of documentation which represents me as being made officially aware, whatever I might have read in the newspapers or whatever might have landed on my desk informally." That is how I understand it.
A further dialogue ensued between the then Minister, Deputy Desmond, and a Deputy from The Workers' Party, if I am permitted to mention that party since they are not represented here. Contrary to rumours about myself, I do not represent The Workers' Party. The Minister made the following statement: "I am not aware of any instance of a health board failing to accept responsibility for providing shelter and maintenance for eligible people." That is the kernel of the Minister's statement and the aspect of it that I want to dwell on and extend in some detail.
In the context of Carlow and of health board provision generally for the homeless that is an extraordinarily all-embracing statement and puts a credulity-testing strain on the normal interpretations of the English language.
In the case of Dublin the State subvention to the voluntary organisation I am connected with has fallen from 25 per cent of that organisation's annual expenditure in 1970 to less than 3 per cent in 1982 and in Cork from 32 per cent in 1977 to 13 per cent in 1982. If that is what a Minister means by accepting responsibility for homeless people, then one could argue whether he is quite correct. Unfortunately those of us who have to deal with homeless people find that definition of the State's responsibility extremely limited and unhelpful.
The Minister, in response to some further elaborations and supplementaries, said he accepted that the situation in Carlow was unsatisfactory and that he had asked the health board to make more positive arrangements. That at least was some progress. I had on and off informal contact with the group in Carlow. One or two nuns and three or four students are not really the sort of group that could take on a major project, but they are very concerned people and their stamina is admirable. Their constant feedback was that they were making no progress. When they found sites, they got no responses etc. in spite of the fact that it was acknowledged by the South Eastern Health Board that there was a problem and that something should be done about it. I emphasise this is a problem that was created by direct public policy, the closure of a ward in a hospital which was under the control of the South Eastern Health Board.
I had a discussion with the Minister on one occasion about this. The Minister wrote to me and said:
I have now received a report from the Board and I am satisfied that although the situation is still far from being resolved, there is no indication of a lack of co-operation on the part of the Board. Indeed, the Acting Programme Manager has recently asked the local Director of Community Care to arrange to have an early meeting with the existing sub-group which is representative of the Board and the Group and furthermore, to arrange for bi-monthly meetings of the sub-group to try to resolve the problem of finding a suitable premises.
That was the Minister's statement. I immediately checked with the local voluntary organisation and got the reply that the South Eastern Health Board had not approached the group about any meetings with them. They further elaborated that it was only subsequently after persistent telephone calls from them that they got any kind of a meeting. There was no suggestion of an approach from the statutory authorities. It was only after persistent telephone calls from the voluntary group that any interest was shown in the problem by the South Eastern Health Board, and no question of bi-monthly meetings ever arose.
Much to my astonishment — and after two years or so in this House my ability to be astonished is diminishing rapidly but I was still a little bit taken aback at this one — the Minister's letter continued:
The Board has taken the new — quite reasonably, in my opinion, in view of the difficult financial situation — that it is the function of the voluntary Group to initially seek out a suitable premises and then to purchase or otherwise acquire it as a shelter.
I do not know in our free market economy of any other way to get property generally other than to purchase it. Perhaps the Minister knows some other way or perhaps the junior Minister can elaborate and explain to me. The letter continued:
The Board is prepared to assist by way of capital and revenue grants as resources permit and so on. The Christian Care Group apparently does not share the board's view.
Quite clearly what happened in Carlow was that a voluntary group identified the problem of homelessness which was created by a deliberate act of public policy by the health board in the area, did their best to bring that problem to the notice of the statutory authority and had great trouble in getting the statutory authority to meet them. They have now been told by the Government Minister responsible that irrespective of what caused the problem or why it is there, it has now landed firmly on their plate to solve the problem.
There has been some suggestion of progress subsequently in the sense that that great source of escape for all Government agencies dealing with the poor for the last 200 years, the St. Vincent de Paul Society, has now been asked to take on yet another responsibility, that of running a hostel for the homeless in Carlow. That would not be too bad except that nobody can get a precise indication from the South Eastern Health Board about the scale or the nature or the continuity of the financial assistance they will provide. As I outlined in the beginning of my remarks, the experience of the voluntary organisation that I am connected with is that the goodwill is great at the beginning and so is the financial assistance, but as matters proceed and new agencies develop, the financial assistance tends to recede and diminish to become, at least in Dublin Simon's experience, almost of trivial proportion.
What these people in a small town with limited resources are particularly worried about is that if any voluntary organisation intended to take on this work, which should be done by the State and was being done by the State, they would be landed with a major project which could accommodate seven, 10 to 15 people and be left with a major financial burden. This calls for a reassessment of the present statutory position. It calls for clarification of the financial provision that the South Eastern Health Board are prepared to make. It calls for clarification of the capital funding available and the current funding. Will they agree, for instance, to pay the salary of a full-time staff member? That would be a major burden removed from the shoulders of a voluntary organisation. I am assuming they will make the capital available. If they do something like that, then there will be progress.
If the Minister can persuade the South Eastern Health Board to be specific about financial provision, to be generous with capital provision, then something can be done. Otherwise a situation, which is not untypical of a lot of midland towns of that size, will probably become worse because the experience of every urban area is that the problem of urban homelessness is increasing rapidly.
