James Browne (Wexford, Fianna Fail)

I saw a presentation on this yesterday. There are now record numbers of preventions. The preventions are absolutely key. The easiest thing to do is prevent people going into homelessness. That could be through tenant in situ, allocation of a social home, alternative HAP or homeless HAP, RAS or whatever the case may be but preventing people going into homelessness is absolutely key. Homelessness has a massive impact on people's mental health. I am very aware of that. It is not a place we want any children either. There is that focus on prevention but when people do end up in homelessness, we want them to exit as quickly as possible. That is why we have allocated an additional €100 million to secure homes for people in longer-term homelessness to get them out of it.

We have seen a significant increase in the delivery of social homes as well. The way to end homelessness is through the delivery of sufficient numbers of social home resolutions. We can all talk about the history of why but unfortunately, we were not delivering the social homes we needed and the capacity had been removed from the system. It is also about building up capacity so we can increase that delivery as well.