Jan O'Sullivan (Limerick City, Labour) | Oireachtas source

The Minister, Deputy Burton is carrying out a review of rent supplement. I am not here to answer for her. We intend to transfer that clientele to the local authorities in the near future. I recently launched a housing-led policy on homelessness. All the research shows that if we can get people into homes as soon as possible rather than hostels for long periods of time that is a much more effective way of addressing their homelessness and of giving them a long-term sustainable and caring solution. We are working on that. We are going to spend less money on hostels and crisis intervention and more money on resettlement and support. That is the direction of the housing-led policy I have launched.

I am very hopeful that we are making good progress on homelessness including in the Dublin area where the predominant problem of homelessness is. This is a very important issue and I am glad Deputy Broughan raised it today. We are sourcing as much social housing as we can through NAMA.

We want to use whatever mechanisms we can use at present. Whenever some capital becomes available we intend to construct more local authority houses.

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