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

The range of questions was diverse but I will do my best to answer as many as I can. Deputy Adams is of course correct in saying that approximately seven homeless people have died in recent weeks. Roughly speaking, between 40 and 50 homeless people die every year. Each one is a tragedy and very sad. People who are homeless die for all sorts of different reasons, whether physical health, overdose, addiction, mental health issues, suicide or violence on some occasions. That speaks to the fact that this is such a complex social issue and is not just a simple matter of providing shelter or housing. A range of supports is required, particularly in the health area, relating to mental health and addiction, and overdose in particular. That is a difficult problem that we face as a country. It is one faced all over the world.

Additional beds are being provided to ensure that we have a surplus number of beds available in the city and around the country.

Approximately 60 will come onstream today, with another 60 before the end of the week, on Little Britain Street and in Cabra. The intention is to have another 200 beds in single or double rooms. They are not Florence Nightingale institutional type accommodation. We will have 200 in place by 18 December and the intention is to ensure there is a bed and shelter available for everyone who wants it and needs it. This is something we want to ensure is in place not just for the winter period, but also through to spring and summer.

We have also had the development of the family hubs, of which people are aware, providing much more appropriate family-type accommodation, where people can make their own food and have access to recreational areas. As a result of the development of family hubs, the number of families with children who are being accommodated in bed and breakfasts and hotels has fallen since it peaked last spring. We hope to see more progress on this front in the coming months.

Housing First was specifically mentioned, and I mentioned it earlier myself. It is a programme to take people who are rough sleeping and provide them with housing, but not just housing. They need to be able to hang onto the housing so we need to put in place a range of social, health and other supports so they can stay in the house or apartment they are given and do not end up rough sleeping again. A total of 180 people have already been moved out of homelessness and rough sleeping into a Housing First model. At the request of the various charities and agencies that work in the sector, a national director for Housing First will be appointed. That appointment will be made in the next two weeks. I hope it will make a difference in the months and years ahead.

On public housing, as I mentioned earlier, 2,000 houses, or homes, will have been directly built by local authorities this year. This needs to be ramped up over time. It was only a couple of hundred a few years ago and we are up to 2,000 this year. It will be 3,800 next year, in addition to the voids being brought into use and long-term leases such as the Iveagh Trust one I was at a couple of days ago. I know people do not count them, but I think they should be counted and certainly the people living in them are counted. There are also direct purchases from developers through Part V and other mechanisms. These will bring the number of new social homes available to be occupied to more than 7,000 next year for people and their families. We will see a real ramping up in the provision of public housing in the coming years.

In terms of general supply, commencement notices are up significantly, as are planning permissions. We are seeing about a 50% increase in all of these, so we are starting to see the development of new homes and houses in Dublin and throughout the country, but it is coming from a very low base and we acknowledge as a Government that it will take time for us to get to the point where the number of new homes is meeting the demand for new homes and then to get ahead of it. This is not something we will be able to do quickly, and no Government would be able to do it quickly.

I was struck by the honesty of the Sinn Féin housing spokesperson at the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis recently, where he enunciated the Sinn Féin policy on social housing, which is to build approximately 10,000 a year until the housing list is cleared. That would still leave people waiting nine or ten years on the housing list before they would get their house. It would require two terms of Sinn Féin in office for people joining the housing list today to get social housing. I thought that was very honest. It is the reality of what it will take to get on top of these issues, because we cannot just ramp up social housing or private housing overnight. There are capacity constraints of all sorts, but we are going to ramp it up as quickly as we possibly can, and that is with regard to social housing as well as private housing.

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