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

I think I am correct in saying that when this Government came to office, or certainly when the current Minister came to office, the number of people in emergency accommodation was 8,000. It is now 10,000. That is not quite a doubling but it has got worse - there is no denying that - despite our best efforts.

In terms of what we have been trying to do to alleviate the situation, the most important thing is preventing people becoming homeless in the first place. As I mentioned, because we fund and work with so many charities and NGOs, we are able to prevent half of people becoming homeless in the first place. That is a significant change from where we were a few years ago. We have also invested in the family hubs, precisely because we accept that hotel and bed and breakfast accommodation is inadequate. Whereas family hubs are by no means perfect, they are better.

They give people dignity, their own door, their own cooking facilities, and their own play areas. I have been to visit them and I have seen them for myself. The people who spend time in family hubs get out of them into permanent housing much quicker than those who self-accommodate. Above and beyond all that, the solution has to be more supply of social housing, so we can take people off the housing list and out of emergency accommodation, more supply of private housing so that people have homes to buy, as most people want to buy their own home, and also more homes for people to rent because lots of people will need to rent at some point in their life. We need to get to the point where we are building approximately 35,000 new homes in Ireland every year, as the Central Bank said. We have trebled housing supply just under the term of this Government of Fine Gael and the Independent Alliance.

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