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

Ireland East does not align with the CHO but extends from Navan through the Mater Hospital all the way down to Wexford, which made sense from the point of view of putting hospitals together to make them part of an academic group but which did not make sense geographically when it did not align with community health organisations. Putting hospital groups and CHOs together is going back to the philosophy of integrating primary care and secondary care services.

I do not have the answers on the SNA issues raised by Deputy Richard Boyd Barrett, but I will check them and correspond with him. I am sure what he said is not the intention, but I will get a proper answer for him.

On housing and homelessness, I am not particularly interested in engaging in a statistical debate on the number of people in emergency accommodation as the Minister, Deputy Eoghan Murphy, and Deputy Eoin Ó Broin seem to be doing on a weekly basis. Whether the total is 9,000, 10,000 or 11,000, there are considerably more people in emergency accommodation than there used to be. My focus is on solutions and I am reassured by the figures from Ulster Bank yesterday which showed that the level of construction activity was really picking up. I can see it in my constituency where new apartment blocks and housing estates are being built. That is not the case all around the country, but it is starting to happen in Dublin, particularly in west Dublin. Some 18,000 new homes began construction in the past year and we need to get the number up to 25,000 to meet demand, before getting above it in the following year in order that we can catch up with pent-up demand from the years when very few houses were built. Last year we added, by various mechanisms, 7,000 units to the stock of social housing, which allowed us to move 4,000 families out of homelessness. The struggle we have, of course, is that as many families and people are becoming homeless as we can provide social housing for. The time will come when we will reach equilibrium and get on top of the issue and the position will start to improve, but we are not quite at that point yet.

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