Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

That response from the Minister is astounding. He seems to be claiming on the one hand that local authority owned or leased properties cannot be considered emergency accommodation, yet 63 units in Tallaght Cross, in my constituency, owned by a local authority are emergency accommodation and the families in that accommodation are included in the March figures. Likewise, hubs are leased by local authorities and the families in those for six, 12, 18 or 24 months are in emergency accommodation.

In Louth, for example, 58 of the 100 families the Minister had removed from the March figures are in short-term, emergency type accommodation arrangements. They are in properties that have been leased by the local authority but they do not have tenancies and they are no different from being in a hotel or in a hub. Twenty-two families are transitioning into the housing assistance payment, HAP, scheme, but at the time the figures were submitted to the Minister's Department before he had them changed, they were not in receipt of HAP and were therefore being funded through emergency section 10 funding and should have been considered homeless.

I will grant the Minister this. There were 20 families in HAP tenancies with a section 10 emergency funding top-up. I do not believe those families should be in the homeless figures. They should be removed, but that means 80 of the 100 families the Minister had removed from the figures in Louth are homeless, are in emergency accommodation type situations and should be classified as such. I challenge the Minister again to correct the record. Otherwise, he is claiming that these families who are homeless are not, and that is an insult to them and their children.

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