"It's about not assuming you can get it right. It shifts and changes. There could be a sea change happening down there and it will hit us in the face in two weeks' time."
Ms Orla Barry, head of services with Focus Ireland, was talking about the complexity of dealing with youth homelessness. One shift was a surge in the number of young people using hostels for the homeless and other services in the late 1990s. "I remember it very well," she says. "We didn't have a major drug-use problem in our hostels before that. It really began to hit in the summer of 1996 when ecstasy came in big time and kids started smoking heroin to come down."
That was when the public began to notice the increased number of young people bedding down in city doorways. The demand for hostel places exceeded supply. Some young people could not, in any event, fit in with hostel rules. Some older hostel-dwellers even moved on to the streets out of fear of young drug-users moving into hostels.
Not every young homeless person is a drug-user. She instances children who have done the Junior Cert during periods of their lives when they were uncertain where they were going to sleep at night.
But there are many whose problems are deeper. Many young people on the streets have learning difficulties and psychological or emotional problems. They are youngsters who, as she puts it, "in terms of their concentration, their ability to interact with others, ability to manage their own emotions would have real difficulties".
Very often they have "fallen through the education system". Neither they nor their families got the help they needed when they were young children.
There is considerable agreement, among health board and voluntary workers, that a core group of 20-30 young people need services in the city centre, but the focus has to be on helping children and families in their own areas and much earlier.
"The real heavy resources have to go into family support," says Mr Pat McLoughlin, director of planning and commissioning with the Eastern Regional Health Authority. Many of today's problems arise from a failure to support families in the past, he says. During the cutbacks of the late 1980s and early 1990s, frontline workers were being let go "and a price was paid".
The ERHA has appointed Ms Alice O'Flynn as director of homelessness, and her appointment has been greeted with optimism. Her most recent job was with Barnardos Scotland, setting up and developing services for a range of young people in situations which could include prostitution and sleeping rough. Before that she worked in London's West End managing a day centre at a time when there was "a whole load of people sleeping out in Waterloo".
"Ireland is trying to catch up on 20 years' lack of resources," she declares. The resources are there now, she says (and Focus Ireland agrees). Apart from services to help that core group in the city centre, they will be directed, she says, to building up capacity in local areas so that when a family hits a crisis there's support for them.