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

Unfortunately, we are seeing a rise in people who are homeless and need to access emergency accommodation. I am thankful that we are able to provide emergency accommodation for almost everyone who needs it. We do not see, or at least we very rarely see, families having to sleep on the streets or sleep in cars, as is often the case in other countries. Nobody wants us to end up in that situation. With a few exceptions, which are often very difficult and complex cases, we are able to provide emergency accommodation to everyone but that is not where we want to be. We do not want to be providing emergency accommodation for over 10,000 people, which is what we are doing now. The experts and people who work at the coalface tell me it is being driven by three things. One is indeed landlords giving people notices to terminate as they sell up and leave the market. There is a real difficulty securing housing assistance payment, HAP, tenancies and that is why we have increased the HAP limits quite considerably. There has been a significant increase in the last couple of months of families from overseas - non-Irish families - presenting for emergency accommodation. In general, they are not entitled to social housing in Ireland but we provide them with emergency accommodation on a humanitarian basis, as we should. Those are the three factors driving the increase in homelessness according to the experts and the people working at the coalface and in the field.

As for what we can do to help, the rent credit will help some people with their rents. It is €500 per person, so for a couple it is €1,000 and for three people renting it is €1,500. In many cases it will be the best part of a month's rent to help people with that. I advise people who face the possibility of losing their home to engage with the prevention services as soon as possible. That could be through the Government services or NGOs like Threshold and Focus Ireland because prevention works and we need to resource those areas a little better.

A no-fault eviction ban over the winter period is being weighed up by the Government. I certainly have no ideological objection to that. We introduced it when I was Taoiseach during the last Government, although that was during the Covid crisis when there were restrictions on movement and the circumstances were different. We have to weigh up the pros and cons. The obvious advantage is fewer people losing their homes over the winter period. The obvious disadvantage is when it ends, we may see a glut of homelessness occurring at that time which is harder to deal with. It may indeed accelerate the number of landlords leaving the sector and might result in a higher level of homelessness next year. Nobody wants to do anything that helps a problem get a bit better for a few months only to make it much worse in a year's time. We have to weigh it up. As the Taoiseach said, it cannot be the only response and must be part of a wider response.

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