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

I thank the Deputy. Just over 13,000 people are in receipt of emergency accommodation from the State at the moment. It is not the same 13,000 people all the time, as the Deputy knows. There are people coming into homelessness and others going out of homelessness. Our objective is to ensure homelessness is rare, that it is not repeated and that when it occurs, it is short lived. At the moment, people who experience homelessness spend roughly six to nine months in homelessness. That is a long time, particularly for a child, and the best thing we can do is to speed up the provision of social housing so we have options and can get people into secure tenancies as quickly as possible.

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