I thank the committee for the opportunity to address it. I am the CEO of Dundalk Simon Community. To give some brief background, we work with people from the counties of Louth, Meath, Cavan and Monaghan. We provide services over a range of areas, outreach, prevention, emergency accommodation, settlement, supported housing, day support and independent living. We therefore work right across the gamut of services.
Our approach is one of protecting and upholding the human rights of all people who access our services, particularly in the areas of housing, health, education and employment. All those with whom we work have a right to be treated with dignity and respect, as individuals and as citizens of Ireland.
I would like to outline some of the main issues that arise when we begin to look at homelessness as both a rural and an urban issue or concern. While urban homelessness, particularly rough sleeping, is more visible in towns and cities, this does not mean that people do not become homeless in rural areas. On the contrary, lack of emergency night shelters and hostels in rural areas means that people who become homeless there tend to travel towards the towns and cities where they hope to get the supports they need. There are particular problems in rural areas in relation to isolation. Often there is limited access to support services, information and public transport.
For example, in the north east, the area that I am particularly involved in, a person who is homeless with a particular alcohol or drug problem will find it virtually impossible to get a place in a residential detox programme without having to leave his or her community to go to Dublin, Cork or Limerick. I know of at least four people over the past couple of months who have not been able to access a detox programme in that area. When people gravitate towards urban areas, they often find support services are full and are left with little option but to sleep wherever they can, normally on the streets. Walking through Dublin today I saw several such people. This means that extremely vulnerable people will have moved away from their friends and family, the critical support networks and structures that most of us take for granted. However, this is a time when they are needed most.
Many of the causes of homelessness remain the same, regardless of whether it is an urban or rural area. Ms Kelleher has outlined quite a number of them in terms of drug or alcohol issues, mental health issues, poverty and family breakdown. In Simon we want to see services and responses locally in all parts of the country, so that people are not forced to leave their communities and can remain connected to the support networks of family and friends. Local issues need local responses. This is, and always has been, our approach and it is reinforced in the national homelessness strategy, "The Way Home".
We in the local Simon communities around Ireland see, first-hand, the devastating impact of the current economic crisis on people already marginalised and vulnerable. In many ways the Celtic tiger just passed such people by. People turning to us now, often have nowhere else to go, they have run out of options, are in poor health and are isolated, lonely and excluded. Many have experienced great trauma in their lives and at this point their only option is the Simon Community. The added tragedy is that in the current climate all the Simon communities around Ireland are under increasing pressure in terms of funding — with reductions in statutory funding across a range of budget lines and uncertainty in terms of voluntary donations.
It is more important now than ever before that Simon services are guaranteed the essential funding to allow them to meet the needs of the most vulnerable people in our society. It is critical that we do not turn back the clock on the progress made in addressing homelessness in recent years. None of us sitting on this side of the room knows what will happen in 2010. We have no idea what our funding will be, and we have no service level agreements signed. As we sit here we have no idea where we will stand as regards money, on 1 January. The message we are getting in the north-east is to the effect that there will be cuts.
We know, however, that if there are cuts in our statutory funding, it will be devastating for the people with whom we work. On a more positive note, the supported living initiative, SLI, has been mentioned and we welcome this development. Some considerable work has been done on this in a Dublin context. I am sure Mr. Sam McGuinness will outline that in his presentation. Outside of Dublin the concern is that we are getting very little information on how this and other schemes will be rolled out. In addition, such schemes need to be tailored to meet local needs and local demands. We have had no clarity as yet, on how and when this will happen.
A related gap, which Ms Kelleher alluded to, is the fact that we have identified nationally that people living within our emergency accommodation, whose needs are high, actually fall outside the low and medium support parameters of SLI. If I brought the committee to our emergency accommodation facility in Dundalk, I could introduce members to people there who have been with us for four, five or six years, simply because there is nowhere else for them to go. This means they are living in a 25-bed hostel over that length of time. One man is 79 years of age; he should not be there, but there is nowhere for him to go.
There are several other people like him, not just in Dundalk but right around the country. They fit within the context of complex needs we have spoken about and they depend on our night shelter and emergency accommodation services, just to stay alive. We do not make this point lightly, and it is not a throwaway comment. They will not survive for long if they are forced back on the streets. One of the concerns we have about emergency accommodation and funding is that in the Dublin context it is being defined purely in terms of B & B provision. This means, in effect, that money is being saved under B & B provision by cutting back on initiatives such as SLI and so on. B & B provision has been cut in Louth, and rightly so in some cases, perhaps, because there was vast overspending. However, the next step is that emergency accommodation, namely, the hostels and night shelters we run will not be examined. The point has already been made, in terms of the individuals dependent on that form of emergency accommodation.
On the current legislation, the new Housing Bill 2008 will put local and regional homelessness forums on a statutory footing. This extends to the action plans on homelessness which each forum will develop. We support this development and lobbied for its inclusion in the Bill. It is now critical that becomes a reality. There are some areas where the local and regional forums meet regularly and function very well, but they are less effective in others and in such cases I am not even sure whether they exist at all.
In Dundalk our experience of the regional homelessness forum is varied. On the Louth County Council homelessness forum our experience is extremely positive. It is a very active, enthusiastic and positive forum and we have just signed off on the final draft of our new action plan. We are waiting for an opportunity to present that to the housing SPC and Louth County Council to get it signed off. That is extremely positive from our perspective because it gives us a framework within which to work and develop our services, hopefully over the next three years. In the rest of the north east, we are aware that a forum exists within Meath County Council and a plan is in place which extends to 2011. We are also aware that a homeless forum operates within Cavan and Monaghan. We do not yet sit on those fora, but we would like to. We are not aware of any regional homeless forum in the north east though the idea has been discussed in County Louth. It has been welcomed in a positive way because it is seen as possibly avoiding duplication of service provision and may lead to ways in which we could share services across counties.
We believe the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government has issued guidelines this month to each local authority on the establishment of homeless fora. It is essential that all of these fora are up and running before the end of 2009 and working on their local homeless action plans because therein lies the framework to develop and protect services. If this does not happen some areas of the country will be operating in limbo and the rural-urban divide that has been discussed here will widen when it comes to service provision for people who are homeless. From the point of view of joined-up thinking and collaboration, it is worth noting that the north east regional drugs task force is now represented on the Louth homeless forum. We hope this will be extended to those in Meath, Cavan and Monaghan. Given the well established links between homelessness and drug or alcohol issues, this approach should be encouraged nationally. I now hand over to Mr. Sam McGuiness, CEO of the Dublin Simon Community.