Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The Taoiseach has just given me what is more or less a rundown of what was announced about a month ago. I cannot believe he thinks this is adequate to deal with the current crisis.

I wonder whether the Taoiseach has a real appreciation of the scale of the crisis. As he has just said, the €50 million announced for the provision of accommodation for homeless persons in the next two years will deliver something like 253 housing units nationwide. Obviously, this is to be welcomed, but it will not even scratch the surface in terms of what is needed. These announcements strike me as being on a par with the delusional budget that led to the medical card fiasco. The Government keeps on adopting piecemeal approaches when it is a supply side issue. As I have said on numerous occasions, we have been told at the environment committee that there is a very large amount of money to be leveraged from the European Investment Bank for this purpose, in the region of €500 million, but we are not getting to grips with this problem.

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