Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I have had the same experience as Deputy Mairéad Farrell of going to weddings and meeting friends and colleagues who still live in the parental home. The average age for somebody leaving the parental home in Ireland is now 28 years of age. It used to be 23 or 24 years of age. I was 23 years of age when I left home and I want us to get back to the point where the average age for people leaving home in Ireland is 23 or 24 years of age. I appreciate that very few people are average and everyone's life story is different but it is the case that people now spend four or five years more at home than they would have done say 15 or 20 years ago and we have to turn that around.

We are making progress on home ownership. Some 25,000 first-time buyers got mortgage approval last year. Some 16,000 are real people and I meet them too. Thankfully, I know loads of people who have managed to buy their first home in the last year or so and 16,000 people, couples, have managed to buy their first home in the last year and that is the highest in 15 years. It needs to be way higher. It is happening, though, because of programmes like help-to-buy, and the first home shared equity scheme. I would really encourage opposition parties which do not support those programmes to reconsider that and change their minds on that. Many people have benefitted from those programmes already and a lot of those young people who have it in their mind to use help-to-buy or the first home shared equity scheme to buy their first home are really worried that it might be taken away from them if there is a change of Government. Any reassurance that opposition parties, which do not support those programmes, can give to people that they would not do that would be very welcome.

The Deputy is absolutely right about homelessness. I do think rough sleeping is a different phenomenon, and it is a complex social phenomenon. The number of people who are sleeping rough has fluctuated between 100 and 200 for a very long time now, for ten or 20 years. It is a particular and a very difficult phenomenon to deal with. In terms of wider homelessness, which is people in emergency accommodation provided by the State, there are roughly 11,000 people now in emergency accommodation provided by the State.

To answer the Deputy's question, I do not have the exact number of emergency accommodation units by local authority with me but I will provide them. I know that in the past three to six months, while the eviction ban was in place, we increased the provision of emergency accommodation by about 450 bed spaces.

I do not think emergency accommodation is the solution, nor does Deputy Farrell. The solution, to my mind, is preventing people becoming homeless in the first place. That is why we announced what we announced during the week, in particular the decision to authorise local authorities to buy 1,500 units where the landlord is selling up and there is a tenant in situ. When we think about it, there are 1,600 homeless families in Ireland at the moment, so authorising local authorities to buy 1,500 homes from landlords is not a small intervention. What we need to do now - the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, Deputy Darragh O’Brien, the Minister of State, Deputy Kieran O’Donnell, and I will do it - is to sit on the local authorities and make sure they and the AHBs as well. I know they will. I am disappointed with the extent to which this has been done until now. It needs to be accelerated.