I should like to thank the Cathaoirleach for the opportunity of raising this matter. I wish to raise the delay in the publication of the report of the ad hoc Committee on Homelessness set up by the Minister for Health. This body had a somewhat clouded beginning in the sense that it first surfaced when a voluntary organisation in one part of the country got a request from the local social services council to supply them with some information on homelessness for “the ad hoc committee”. The truth was that nobody knew anything about “the ad hoc committee” and we went looking for it. The first written of an ad hoc committee on homelessness surfaced in a Dáil reply on 13 July 1982. I quote from column 2047 of the Dáil Official Report when Deputy Woods, the Minister for Health at that time, said that the members of the ad hoc committee referred to by the Deputy, representative of the Departments of Health and the Environment, health boards and local authorities, had been nominated and he expected that the ad hoc committee would be meeting within a month.
It was in March 1982 that I first heard of this ad hoc committee. It was in July 1982 that we first got a written statement about its existence in the Dáil and at that stage we were told it would be about a month before it met. I was involved, through another organisation, in a meeting with the committee in May 1983 and I had reason to believe in September 1983 that the report would be out in about two months. That was still the progression of this committee. In November, 1983, preliminary to the introduction of the Homeless Persons Bill in this House, I had discussions with the then Minister for the Environment, the Tánaiste, Deputy Spring, when he informed me that in his view the committee's report would be ready in a matter of months. That was in November 1983, almost 12 months ago.
In the debate on the Homeless Persons Bill in this House, the then Minister of State at the Department of the Environment, Deputy Quinn, had this to say:
Earlier this year (he was factually incorrect because it was earlier the previous year) the Minister for Health set up an ad hoc committee, comprising representatives of that Department, the Department of Social Welfare, my own Department, the health boards and local authorities, to investigate and make recommendations on these questions. In their examination of the issues involved this committee have had the benefit of submissions from the non-statutory agencies or bodies, (including a certain voluntary organisation) who are most intimately concerned with the problem of homelessness. Considering that the committee are representative of all the statutory bodies involved in dealing with the problem and who have first hand practical experience... I am confident that they will be in a position to take a fairly fundamental look at these important aspects of the homelessness problem and that they will come up with recommendations that will be clear-cut, practical and, hopefully, effectual. (They are sentiments we all agree with.) I am hopeful that the committee's recommendations will be available in a matter of weeks.
That was on 9 November 1983. I understand that in the early part of this year it was confirmed to a person outside the public service that the report had been completed and had moved from one Department to another for final approval. I got a letter from the Minister of State at the Department of the Environment, dated 15 December, saying that he had asked the Minister of State at the Department of Health to arrange to have the report of the ad hoc committee finalised as a matter of urgency. In early 1984 we were led to believe that the report had been completed and had gone to another Department. In March 1984 — I refer now to column 885 of the Dáil Official Report for 29 March 1984 — the Minister for Health was asked when the ad hoc committee on the responsibilities of local authorities and health boards to the homeless, set up in 1982, would report and the Minister, in a one and a half line reply, said he expected the committee to report within two months. That was in March 1984.
I felt obliged, later on this year, to raise the matter fairly vigorously with the Minister responsible and I got a letter from the Minister for Health — it probably arrived yesterday — saying he would investigate the matter. This is a matter which he had promised would be completed two months after 29 March and still is uncompleted. On 16 April the Tánaiste, in the course of his address to the Labour Party's Annual Conference, made reference to the provision of shelter for the homeless.
I have no desire to get involved in a public harangue about the problems of the homeless but I have a considerable desire to ensure that just because people like myself appear and try to be reasonable in the timescale we allow for Government Departments to make up their minds about issues, that it should not be taken that somehow the issue has gone away or departed from us. I also have a profound distaste for promises lightly made about immediate reports, and reports "shortly", and within two months, and commitments made like that that are, apparently, just as easily dismissed and ignored when the pressure comes off. It is a matter of profound regret that the question should have been left in this unsatisfactory and incomplete fashion. I sincerely hope that when the Minister reads his script in a few minutes — because I do not propose to take anything like the entire 20 minutes to talk about this issue — it will not be another catalogue of excuses but that it will be straightforward and simply a statement of when the report will be published.
There is a certain irony and sadness about the fact that we are talking about a report on the homeless on a day when a national plan which does not make reference to the homeless, and which makes very positive reference to their problems, is published. Quite truthfully, whatever is said in the report, we had the lethargy and indifference displayed by this chapter of delays, postponements, forgetfulnesses, and easy promises made in moments of political inconvenience — for instance, when there was a threat of rebellion from the Fine Gael and Labour benches in this House on this Homeless Persons Bill all sorts of promises and, indeed, blandishments were being offered about the significance of this committee and, among other things, its terms of references seemed to expand quite dramatically in the course of that discussion.
Apart from that, the fundamental point is that we were told the report was imminent 12 months ago. The sadness is also added to by the story that many of us have been familiar with for a long time and which was well publicised in today's newspapers, of homeless people being driven out of the minimal shelter they had found in the structures of the buildings which house the Departments of Health and the Environment, and the presence of an employee of one of those Departments whose first duty every morning was to run the homeless people out from the shelter of that building and confiscate their blankets.
I do not want to suggest that that is a malicious or a deliberate decision to harass the homeless but it is a remarkably insensitive approach to a frightening and rapidly escalating social problem. I can produce statistics and evidence to underline the fact that this problem is escalating extremely rapidly. The response of the Government all the way through has been postponements, insensitivity and attempts almost to suppress and delineate the range of debate on the issue by way of a Government amendment on the Second Stage of my own Bill.
It is a regrettable, painful but a fairly clear indication of the real significance of the problems of the marginal in our society that they are dismissed in the way I have described. A letter I received from the Minister for the Environment dated 28 September referred to "new housing legislation which, among other things, will deal with the responsibilities of local authorities to have regard to the needs of the homeless in the planning and implementation of their housing programmes."
At the end of almost a two year period from March 1982, in which an ad hoc committee of the best experts available to two Governments have been working on homelessness, that report has got so far pushed down in the list of priorities that it has never been published. Promises have been broken frequently about when publication was due and, finally, we have a description from the Minister for the Environment of the nature of the proposed legislation which is so fundamentally inadequate as to make one wonder if anything that has been said here and outside, or that has been written and submitted to the Government Departments, has even been read by the proponents of the legislation.
As we have been told on many occasions, the local authorities have always had an obligation to have regard to the needs of the homeless but they have failed singularly in this matter. I had hoped that the ad hoc committee was a serious effort to redress the administrative problems, the overlap of responsibilities, the inadequacies and the scale of the problem of the homeless. It now appears that far from being that, in the past 15 months it was an excuse for the Government to postpone action on the question of homelessness. It was used as an excuse to try to divert a number of people in national politics from their concern for the homeless. It was used as an excuse to try to persuade people not to push forward with legislation on the rights of the homeless. It was used as an excuse for indecision in a number of areas. It was used as an excuse and as an indication of goodwill but on each of those counts it has failed completely.
The report is long overdue. I am satisfied it is virtually completed. It may or may not be of any great use but for those of us, inside and outside this House, who are endeavouring to do something about one particular marginal group this ad hoc committee was seen as a sign of hope and of concern. The absence of the report, the breaking of promises, the fact that it no longer seems to be a matter of the slightest concern, as indicated by all those broken promises, begins to raise questions about the sincerity of what I thought was a genuine commitment to the concerns of the homeless. Therefore, I look forward with some interest to the Minister's reply.
