Eoghan Murphy (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Casey for his questions. The Deputy's first question related to the mis-categorisation and re-categorisation of the homeless that took place as a result of the March figures, it was a judgment call but I am quite convinced that had I gone out into the public and given a number that I knew was not correct, that would have been the wrong thing to do. I do not like to give information when I do not have the full facts to hand but I was in a position where I had to produce a report for the monthly figures. I knew that the number was incorrect, it had been overstated and it was still overstated when I put out the global number for March. It is still not the correct number because the mis-categorisations were still on the system and had not been worked out, but I felt it would have been irresponsible of me to come out and not be honest and upfront that this had occurred. To have gone about it in any other way would have been wrong.

The use of hotels for emergency housing is very difficult because we all agree that not one family should be in housed in a hotel as emergency accommodation. That is why we have the family hub programme and we have almost 500 family hub places with more coming online every month. Unfortunately, because the number of families in hotels are still roughly a little bit higher than at this time last year, it gives the impression that the families have been there all this time and that nothing has happened. In fact over the course of 2017, more than 2,000 people in families left hotels and bed and breakfast accommodation and the majority went into homes. Significant work is being done by local authorities, by the homeless executive, the NGO sector and partner organisation to help these families, but families in need of accommodation continue to present, seeking housing. That is the reason that I put such an emphasis on prevention at the beginning of this year.

What we do know thankfully from families staying in family hubs rather in hotels and bed and breakfast accommodation is that they are spending less time in that emergency accommodation. That means there is a better outcome for those families. We will continue with the family hub programme and we will make every effort to continue to move families out of hotels and bed and breakfast accommodation and into homes and sustainable pathways.

When rapid build housing was first considered and obviously the name is a bit of a misnomer, we are talking about modular prefabricated housing, that was seen as doing something on the cheap. It was seen as being less perfect than a normal home. In fact the industry has moved to off-site fabrication, pre-fabrication and modular house building which are all new technologies. All of these new technologies are happening in the private sector. It is not a second class type of home. It is just as good as any other home that is being built in the country today. I would like every local authority to move to modular prefabricated housing as it is appropriate to do so because we know we can deliver it through much quicker timelines.

What we had to put in place in February 2017 was a special procurement framework for rapid build housing but because it was only put in place at the beginning of last year, we could not deliver the number of rapid build houses that we wanted to deliver at the time. We have that new procurement model in place. We probably need to amend that procurement model because so many more companies have come in. There are even newer advances in technology that could allow us to do this even more quickly than before. As we do that, and improve the procurement framework model, we will see more local authorities move to rapid build housing. It comes back to the initial question I was asked at the very beginning of our session in terms of numbers and how we present them - we should be at a point in time this time next year when we are not even talking about rapid build houses as distinct from traditional build, it is all just build. That is what we are trying to move to at present.

On the social house construction report, I am not sure what the problem is of using a PDF in terms of what the Deputy is trying to do with an excel spreadsheet, but-----