Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Last year 2,700 housing solutions were put in place for homeless individuals and families. I will have to get the figure for the split between the two but many were families. If one looks at the figure for January, which was not a good figure overall in terms of homelessness and which people have commented on, the number of homeless adults has increased. That was not a huge surprise to us considering that we put a lot of extra emergency beds into the system. Those beds have been filled by and large so it is not surprising the numbers are up somewhat. If one looks at the number homeless families, it is down by 33 and the number relating to dependants is down by 98. We are making some progress there considering 87 families came into homelessness in that month. The truth is that in the past number of months we have managed to stop the significant increase by taking a lot of people out of homelessness as quickly as possible. We need to ensure that we slow down the numbers coming into homelessness and continue to increase the pace in which we can facilitate the transition out of emergency accommodation. I am still confident we can do that by 1 July; I have always said it would be in the first half of this year and there will obviously be a difference. That only gives us four months. It is a big job to get between 700 and 800 families out of hotel accommodation and into appropriate accommodation in that period of time, but we are determined to do it.

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