Michael McGrath (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

It will be addressed. We acknowledge the strain that is there in relation to the provision of emergency accommodation at this time. I attend all of the housing Cabinet committee meetings where we go into detail on all of the strands of this. The Government is working collectively, using every resource available to us to make sure that accommodation generally is made available to meet all of the needs that are there. If people need emergency accommodation, they will get the support they need.

As I said, we are providing a huge amount of support through short-term rent supports. We want to move away from that because we want people to have security of tenure and we want the State to be getting better value than paying hundreds of millions of euro in short-term rental supports.

We have to acknowledge that the dearth of rental accommodation is in part because of the number of landlords who have been leaving the system. We have to ask ourselves collectively why it is the case that thousands of landlords are making the decision at a time of high rents-----

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