Dáil Éireann Debate, Tuesday - 7 November 2017
1090. Deputy Mary Lou McDonald asked the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs if she will request Tusla to collect figures for women and children using domestic violence refuges and step down accommodation on a monthly basis for inclusion in the monthly Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government homeless figures. [45639/17]
View answerTusla, the Child and Family Agency, has statutory responsibility for the provision of services to victims of domestic, sexual and gender based violence. Services are delivered by some 60 organisations nationally, 16 providing sexual violence services, and 44 providing community based services to victims of domestic violence, of which 20 provide specialist emergency accommodation.
Tusla facilitates a range of services to victims of domestic violence and their families, including 155 family units, comprising 147 emergency refuge family units and 8 emergency non-refuge family units. The remit of these services is to provide safe emergency accommodation on a short-term basis.
As part of its national information project, Tusla gathers administrative data from its service provider organisations, on an annual basis. Currently arrangements are not in place to seek monthly data on accommodation provision from these organisations.
As refuges are used to capacity most of the time, the numbers of individual families using them remains fairly stable at any time. Depending on the number and size of families in residence at a particular moment in time, there can be variations in the numbers of children in refuges.
Tusla will be seeking further details from provider organisations in 2018 on use of refuges, and remains open to contributing to homelessness data should there be a particular request to the Agency.
