It is a publication entitled No Fixed Abode, a publication for external use by the Simon Communities in Ireland. Michael is one of the 1,000 or so people who live rough in this country, who have been the victims for the last I do not know how many years of the bureaucratic confusion and buck passing to which the homeless have been subjected. As recently as a couple of weeks ago there was a report of a person having been evicted in Dún Laoghaire, an unmarried mother. The response of the housing authority in that area was: “Because the girl is now homeless she is no longer a responsibility of the housing authority. Because she is homeless she is the responsibility of the health board. We will be contacting the health board to see what they can do about her case.” That has been the experience of homeless people up and down this country, so much so that in March 1982 the then Minister for Health, Michael Woods, decided to do something about it and he set up a committee. That was the committee whose report we were promised here seven weeks ago would be completed in four weeks. In the meantime the weather has got colder and wetter. People will begin to die. We will not be able to prove that they die from homelessness. It is not as simple as that. Their life expectancy will be severely reduced. Various complaints will begin to make themselves more manifest, and then when they are beyond recovery we will admit them to the care of the State in a hospital where we will look after them and ensure at least that they die in the comfort that we could never give them when they were fit to live. In the middle of all that, at the same time as people are being run off the steps of the Custom House, wherein the Department of Health and the Department of the Environment are housed, we will have £1 million being spent on renovating the exterior and the magnificent architecture of that building while a significant proportion of the resources are being devoted to making sure the homeless do not deface the aesthetic appeal of that magnificent building.
All the time people in that building, and it must be those with Government or ministerial office who take the responsibility, promised and promised and promised and promised and failed to deliver. In the same way that they have promised and promised and promised legislation and failed to deliver. In the same way that they have promised and promised reviews in the area of health care for the homeless and failed to deliver. In the same way that this Government are now apparently prepared to abandon homeless children in Dublin for the sake of a miserable £10,000 or £20,000. We do not know why, because apparently we cannot do anything and at the same time they promised and promised legislation on children and failed to deliver. At the core of all of this and on this specific issue are 3,000 people who have one thing in common, that they are homeless. They have a lot of other problems which are products of that experience like bad health, nervous complaints, pyschiatric complaints, prison records, drink problems and all sorts of other things. They are all products of one common experience, the experience that nobody in this House or the other House ever had to go through or ever, please God, will have to go through, the experience of chronic homelessness. The sense of isolation, of being outside and of being excluded, that that particular experience produces in people is something that nobody understands and I do not claim to understand it any more than anyone else.
All I would say is that many people have seen the consequences of the experience of homelessness and it is not nice or pleasant to behold in terms of human suffering, of despair, of the destruction of people who had a right to a decent life. In that context, it was an extraordinary decision to postpone a report which was not a question of policy but merely a resolution of a conflict of administrative practice, which was not a matter of enormous expenditure but was simply a matter of solving a problem about which bureaucracy was at least responsible. Even if they did not do anything we would at least know who was responsible, because it would be another and long day's work to get some of those bureaucracies to respond. It was not a matter of major Government policy. It was simply a question of ensuring that those who were given a job to do did it properly, promptly, efficiently and on time. All I can say is that if we cannot get one small committee working on one specific area of a social problem then all the meaningless cant about a comprehensive social policy is so much rhetoric and so much nonsense, because if you cannot deliver on the small things then you will not deliver on the big things, the big things that demand resources and commitment and organisation and policy and decisions. We do not need any of those for the homeless. We simply want something that has been promised for 15 or 16 months and which seems to be as far away as ever.
In the light of the fairly categorical assurance that the Minister of State gave me there, I was interested in a reply to a written question in the Dáil today in which this same ad hoc Committee on Homelessness was raised. The reply there was quite specific. All of a sudden there had been a problem about the committee completing its report. Several weeks ago the committee was all set to report within four weeks. Now there is a problem about the committee completing its report and it is going to meet on 3 December. Then maybe we will have a report. This is the committee that seven weeks ago we knew when it was going to report. Let it be said further that a voluntary organisation connected with the homeless was informed before the summer that the report was completed by a senior official in the Department of Health. Last summer it was completed. Last October it was completed. Now at the end of November and almost into December mysteriously it is no longer completed. It has to go back to yet another committee meeting. Who in God's name is fooling whom? What I would suggest is something entirely different but in the pressures of business, in the pressures of the grand plans of State and of the great issues of strategy and policy, a tiny marginal group like the homeless go sliding down the list of priorities, and that is where political will is required. That is where one expects people with stated senses of social concern to ensure that those groups who will never be effective as political lobbyists, who will never have the clout to create a major storm, continue to be important. The sort of fiction we are given, the promise of a report 12 months ago, the promise of a report completed early in the summer, the further promise of a report completed in October, followed by the nonsense of the non-availability of a report, followed by the creation of yet another meeting in December, is not the way to treat any group, however vulnerable, however voiceless, however unheard and however unseen.
It is, therefore, a matter of profound regret that we have got ourselves into what begins to sound more and more like a combination of Myles na Gopaleen and George Orwell and the capacity of people in some of the Soviet bloc countries to rewrite history in their own image and behaviour. What we have now is language no longer meaning what it is purported to mean; a promise is not a promise; four weeks can become eight weeks; a report that was completed six months ago suddenly becomes incomplete five months later; something that was imminent becomes indefinitely delayed and the problem of the homeless becomes a problem of organisation and administrative detail and apparently of some sort of major and fundamental confusion somewhere within the ranks of that body which is known collectively as the bureaucracy but which individually we are not entitled to criticise.
We have therefore an extraordinary, illusory world which begins out there at the gate, where words that to ordinary simple men mean four weeks suddenly do not mean that any more, where words like "imminent" do not mean that any more, where words like "a report completed" suddenly do not mean that any more. You come through the gate and words begin to mean different things. Words begin to mean whatever it suits you to say at the moment in time when the issue is raised. That is where we are now. The one reality which will not go away is the condition of those about whom these people were supposed to be making recommendations. The one reality that will not go away is that that condition is deteriorating rapidly; that their numbers are increasing; that the obfuscation of bureaucracy is getting worse as their financial position gets worse; that their experience is now adequately documented. Until recent years the one excuse was that we did not know about the problem.
We know now, and instead of endeavouring to do anything or promising to do anything we are simply putting it on a longer and longer finger. Therefore, without going on at unnecessary length and in the hope that the Minister will for once make a promise that can be kept and will not fob us off — because I will be back again in another six weeks or another two months until this blessed committee finally discovers the basic skill of literacy, writes its report, completes it and manages to discover photo-copying machines to distribute it to those of us who have waited for far too long and far too patiently for a basic, fundamental piece of administrative detail to be straightened out. I look forward to the Minister's reply. I have about five minutes left. If any of my colleagues wish to comment I would be delighted to hear them.
