There are currently 3,784 children who are homeless. That figure is constantly changing. Every week, families exit homelessness. However, the problem under this Government is that a greater number enter homelessness annually than leave. Homelessness is an experience that has affected tens of thousands of people over the last decade. It has a deep scarring affect on society. Today's report by the Ombudsman for Children, Dr. Niall Muldoon, gives voice to the experience of children living in family hubs that the Government has provided as temporary accommodation. The Ombudsman for Children stresses the deep emotional impact that this is having on children who have expressed feelings of guilt, shame and anger because of their living circumstances. This is despite the fact that these circumstances are totally outside their control.

My colleague, Deputy Jan O'Sullivan, has acknowledged that family hubs were designed to do better than what was there, namely, hotels and bed and breakfast accommodation, because at least they provide cooking and laundry facilities and a play space for children. However, this report points to a range of restrictions that seem inexplicable, completely unnecessary and punitive. People in family hubs cannot have guests. Why is that? Children in family hubs must be accompanied at all times by their parents. Families are living in single rooms with a lack of privacy. Is it such a security or safety issue in these locations that those draconian measures are required? Family hubs fall far short of the standards we expect for normal decent housing. Families are staying in them for much longer than they should. If we have family hubs, pending a housing supply adequate to meet need, why do we put punitive regimes in place in these hubs?

Why are people's basic freedoms, such as being allowed to have guests or having the normal degree of personal privacy, denied?

The central issue here is that standards of conduct are being imposed on them. What is the basis for that? Can it be justified and what is the Department's justification, or is it simply the State telling people how to behave? This is an echo of the poorhouses of old and the State restricting the basic freedoms of people in a way that can only, objectively, as the Ombudsman has said, be seen as punitive.

People who are homeless have done nothing wrong. They are simply people who due to a set of circumstances find themselves unable to afford to house themselves. Can the Tánaiste clarify what exactly are the rules imposed on families in these hubs? To what extent do the rules go beyond the normal tenant rules that we would have for local authority tenants? If there is a difference, why?

It began five years ago under the Labour Party. It is going on years.

First, I thank Deputy Howlin for the way in which he raised this question because it is easy to be emotive when one is talking about children who are homeless for understandable reasons.

I was the Minister who made a decision to invest heavily in family hubs out of necessity at the time. We had, and still have, far too many children and families in hotels and bed and breakfast accommodation. I felt we could do something better than that as a temporary measure for people while they are in a transition from the crisis of homelessness to permanent social housing or some other rental accommodation or other form of permanent accommodation.

We have invested well over €100 million in trying to put tailor-made infrastructure in place to support families as best we can in what is effectively family hostel-type accommodation where we try to cater for the broader needs of families, whether that is through homework clubs, play space, separate cooking facilities and separate washing facilities. We have counselling services in some of the hubs to help people make the transition more quickly into social housing, in terms of application forms and all the other things that need to be done.

I have visited many of these family hubs. Of course, they are not ideal for permanent accommodation, but they are not meant to be. They are meant to be a temporary arrangement that can support families, as best we can. We need to ensure that we, in what we say here and outside, do not contribute to the stigma, shame, concern, frustration and anger that many young people feel by having to be in such a hub, hotel, or bed and breakfast accommodation. We need to focus on making sure that we transition families and children out of this type of accommodation as quickly as possible. We have a target turnaround time of six months for family hubs. Families transition far quicker out of hubs than out of hotels, and there are reasons for that.

This is a temporary arrangement while we put in place the necessary capacity, in particular, in terms of social housing, to ensure that we do not have family homelessness in Ireland any longer in the not too distant future. In the meantime, we must have infrastructure that is designed to do as much as we can for children and families who are in this crisis-vulnerable situation and, therefore, I would defend the policy of family hubs.

By the way, I would not disagree with some of the recommendations that have been made here. I would have no problem with independent inspection, for example. We already have a national quality standards framework for homeless services that is applied across Dublin which, I understand, will be extended across the country.

We need to make sure that there is a consistency of service delivery across the family hubs. They are currently operated by Focus Ireland, Crosscare, Good Shepherd, Peter McVerry Trust, Respond, The Salvation Army and Sophia housing, all of which are good organisations that the State is partnering with here to constantly improve services.

Ending homelessness is the social imperative of our time and it can only be resolved when supply is adequate to need. Until we reach that point, and we must provide every resource we possibly can to achieving that objective, family hubs will be there.

I appreciate the amount of money the Government has spent on them. They are, as I have acknowledged, an improvement on bed and breakfast accommodation, but the fundamental question I asked in response to the Ombudsman for Children's report is, why are we, as a State, imposing standards of conduct on residents in family hubs, and what are those standards? Are they allowed guests? Are they allowed to have their children move around freely in them? Is there adequate freedom of action for people in those hubs, and if not, why not, or is the report inaccurate when it reports such matters? Surely the objective should simply be that the standards would be the same as for tenants in any local authority house.

I have not been to all the hubs but I have been to some of them. I understand that the children's Ombudsman did not visit all of them. I think he visited eight and interviewed 80 children, which is quite comprehensive.

We are guided by the NGOs which provide the services, through local authorities, in these individual family hubs. In some of them, the families themselves determine the rules on how the hubs operate but, of course, one must have child protection and security measures in place also. In terms of rules and the contracts in place, not every hub is the same. Indeed, the infrastructure in different hubs is also somewhat different, depending on the property being used and how it has been adapted, etc. Space issues are different and facilities are different within different hubs but we are trying to make sure that there is at least a commonality and a benchmarking of standards across all of them.

As I said, there is nothing to hide here in terms of what we have invested in, but these are temporary measures. We want to make sure that they are as good as they can be as temporary emergency accommodation for families but, ultimately, the answer here is more social housing.

By the way, the direct answer to Deputy Howlin's question is that visitors are allowed into many of the family hubs.

They are not. They all have a curfew also.

I will-----

No. It is not Deputy Coppinger's question.

I will come back to that question-----

There is an alcohol ban as well.

-----if Deputy Coppinger is allowed to ask it.