Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I want to say how deeply saddened I am, as I think everyone is, to hear of the deaths in recent days of two people who were homeless. On my behalf and on behalf of the entire House, I express my condolences to the families and friends of those affected. We understand that one homeless man in his late 30s who had been sleeping rough at the Four Courts has passed away; The Irish Timesreports he was a Lithuanian national and may have died as a result of a drug overdose. The other death occurred in Ranelagh. The cause of the latter death is unknown at this time, but we understand that he had been offered shelter.

Regarding the actions that are taking place, the Minister, Deputy Murphy, has already announced a number of very important measures to ensure that more beds and more shelter are available over the next couple of weeks. Twenty-six additional permanent beds will be provided tonight on Little Britain Street, 25 additional permanent beds in Cabra will be available on Thursday night, and an additional 67 temporary beds will come on stream this week. Therefore, by 18 December we will have 200 more beds available, and by beds I mean single beds or double beds in rooms, not cots. We want to be assured that there is, or at least will be, a bed and shelter available for everyone who needs them in the city not just for the winter period, but beyond into the spring and summer as well. We are also stepping up our actions when it comes to the Housing First programme, whereby not only homes and apartments are provided for people who are homeless, but also wraparound services in order that they are able to stay in the homes or apartments they are given. Since we introduced Housing First solutions, 180 people have already gone from rough sleeping into those solutions. These people were sleeping rough and now have housing with support and have managed to stay in that housing. The Minister will appoint a Housing First director quite soon in order to ensure we can move more people off the streets and into homes through that programme.

The Government's plan to build more housing is very much under way. A Supplementary Estimate of €100 million was also approved at Cabinet on Tuesday morning for the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government. This will enable the Department to meet the costs that have been run up by local authorities in building housing over the past year. Deputies will be aware that 2,000 houses will have been built directly by local authorities by the end of this year, which is a major increase on only a few hundred a year or two ago. We have a €1.8 billion social housing budget for next year for housing, which will allow us to increase the number of social homes built to 3,800. This is almost a doubling and does not include additional social housing acquired by renovating voids, purchasing them from developers, long-term leasing or Part V. This will bring the total number closer to 7,000. Therefore, the issue we will run into is not money at all but rather the capacity of the construction sector to build all these homes. Housebuilding is now ramping up. We can see this from the numbers and we are starting to see it around us, all around the country. The constraining factor will not be money from the Government, but rather the availability of sites and construction workers and others to build the houses we desperately need.

See this speech in context