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

I thank the Deputy. We do not believe that extending the winter eviction moratorium to December, or January, or April, or whatever the Deputy’s policy is this week, is a solution. We think it will just make homelessness worse, but at a later point. The solution is a different one: it is more social housing, it is the tenant in situ scheme, it is more supply, it is tax changes to encourage small landlords to stay in the market and new ones to come in, and it is also funding homelessness prevention services, and that is what we are going to do.

I absolutely appreciate there are a lot of people who are very worried at the moment, people who have received a notice to quit in the past couple of months. They are fearful, they are worried and, in many cases, they are experiencing real anxiety, and I understand that. What I do not appreciate is the Deputy exploiting those fears, adding to them and seeking to amplify them. That is wrong. The answer to the Deputy's question for the vast majority of people who have a notice to quit served on them is that they will find a new tenancy, perhaps with the help of the Government, a local authority or a voluntary body.

As I said earlier in the Dáil, 50,000 new tenancies were created last year. I know Deputy Ó Broin accused me of misleading the House earlier in that regard so, since then, I have checked the facts. According to the Residential Tenancies Board, 52,000 new tenancies were created over the last four quarters, that is, Q4 2021 to Q3 2022.

I will now read from the Q3 RTB index report so everyone is clear on this. It states:

Annual tenancy registration came into effect on 4th April 2022 and requires landlords to register their tenancy every year, within one month of the anniversary of when that tenancy began. As the purpose of the Rent Index is to measure developments in the prices faced by those taking up new tenanciesonly, it therefore at present does not include annual tenancy registrations or existing tenancies. However, given the systematic change of data collection activities with the commencement of annual registrations, prior to beginning the usual Rent Index methodology, the Q3 2022 dataset was subject to additional checks to attempt to ensure the continuity of the underlying data and that they relate to new market registrations only.

Once again, Deputy Ó Broin gets his facts wrong and no level of confidence or chutzpah can cover that up.

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