Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

It is difficult to credit the Taoiseach's claim that the Department is solving the homelessness and housing crisis as a priority given his comments at the weekend. Will he consider apologising and retracting the inaccurate and outrageous attempt to minimise and normalise a disastrous housing and homelessness crisis? I will remind him that he said "Ireland has one of the lowest homelessness [rates] by international standards compared with our peers - they're the stats, we can provide them for you". This comment coincides with a shocking and outrageous statement by Mr. Conor Skehan, the head of the Housing Agency, who says we need to stop using words like "homeless" and "crisis" and recognise that the crisis is "completely normal". That is shocking. One cannot take seriously the Taoiseach's claim that this is a priority for him or inject the sense of urgency necessary to deal with what is a catastrophic situation if that is the attitude. Will the Taoiseach withdraw those comments? Has he seen the statistics provided by Focus, which actually compare us with like comparators in Europe and which were compiled by Professor Eoin O'Sullivan in TCD? They were put out in the last few days and they show that Ireland actually compares badly and its position is much worse and worsening compared to countries where the data collected are comparable. I suggest the Taoiseach looks at them. They show that in comparison with Norway, Finland and Denmark, we have the worst proportion of homelessness by population and that homelessness has increased dramatically under Fine Gael. We have gone from a position of being better on homelessness in 2008 to being the worst of all of those countries. Those figures are actually comparable.

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