Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

In the past few years the NESC has spent a lot of time in focusing on the short, medium and long-term problems in the housing sector. It has brought important experts to the country and emphasised the hard substance in looking at every angle of the problem. It is unfortunate that much of this work has not had the impact on the Government we would have expected it to have and that the Government has not been able to come up with proposals to overcome the chronic delivery deficit between promises and outcomes. Because the Taoiseach is so concerned to ensure issues of substance will be covered in the media, he will have noticed the extensive coverage last week that noted that there were close to 10,000 people on the homeless lists, even after the Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government, Deputy Eoghan Murphy, had acted to change the way the statistics were prepared. A further 137 children have become homeless for the first time, as revealed by the figures, yet, when the figures were released, there was no comment from the Taoiseach who had nothing to say about the continuing rise in the level of homelessness under the Government and the increasingly hapless performance of the Minister. Last year the Taoiseach announced at the Fine Gael Ard-Fheis, "We have a plan and it is working." He came into the House many times to announce that everything was looking up. Will he accept that he was wrong to declare that everything was in hand? What are the new emergency measures the Minister, Deputy Eoghan Murphy, told journalists he would soon be publishing?

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