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

I thank the Deputies for their questions. Deputy Dillon raised the issue of pyrite in County Mayo and whether modern methods of construction and rapid-build housing might form part of the solution. We can and will examine proposals made by Mayo County Council in that regard. Our experience with rapid-build solutions, however, is that they are never as rapid as people may believe they are. They are not much cheaper and while they may be more rapid than regular construction, they are not as rapid as people hope they might be. Often, that is not about the building itself but the site because you cannot just drop a house or apartment building onto a site. It has to be properly serviced and all of those things. That is often the main cause for the delay, rather than the structure itself. We will consider any proposals that are made.

Deputy Murnane O’Connor raised the Government's policy on purchasing social housing. I will have to raise that with the Minister, Deputy O'Brien, and ask him to come back with a reply.

On the issue of not being able to collect social welfare if there is no address, I thought we had a solution for this, namely, that it can be collected if an address can be provided. That might not be the person's address but an address to which the Department can at least write. I thought that was the solution but I will double-check that with the Minister, Deputy Humphreys.

Deputies Boyd Barrett, Paul Murphy, McDonald and Conway-Walsh raised the issues of homelessness. As things stand, 13,000 people are in State-provided emergency accommodation. That could be a hostel, hotel or bed and breakfast accommodation and in some cases it is an own-door apartment. The numbers on the street are thankfully much lower, at in or around 100 or 200, and they are often people who, for different reasons, decide not to accept the shelter that might be available to them. Nonetheless, it is far too many and that is particularly the case with families and children. Our objective as a Government is to reduce the overall number of people in emergency accommodation considerably and that, where people experience homelessness, it should be rare and short-lived and should not be repeated. It is terrible to see some people going in and out of homelessness. That is distressing for them and all of us.

What is our plan? It is prevention, more social housing and more places for people to rent in the private sector. Prevention involves measures such as extending notice-to-quit periods so people have more time to find alternative accommodation. It also involves the tenant in situscheme, where we buy houses and apartments off landlords who are thinking of selling up so that the social housing tenant in the property, who may be in a housing assistance payment, HAP, tenancy, can be regularised and become a normal social housing tenant. It also involves increasing the amount of social housing we are building. In this decade we will break all records since the foundation of the State for the amount of social housing being built. It also involves more HAP tenancies.

To pick up on Deputy Conway-Walsh's point, we are providing more domestic violence refuges and they are being built around the country, as are more safe houses. The latter are an alternative to a refuge, sometimes a better one, depending on the individual circumstances. We all know this is a complex situation, perhaps more so than the Opposition would like people to believe. As all of us know from working with people who are experiencing homelessness, every individual and family has a story and a lived experience and those can be different. For example, there are some people in emergency accommodation who might not be entitled to social housing because they already own a share in a house. It could be a case of family breakdown. The family may have broken up and there is a house but one person lives in the house and the other person cannot live in it. That can make the issue complicated to resolve. The profile of people in emergency accommodation has changed. Approximately 44% of people in emergency accommodation are not Irish citizens. That figure was less than 20% not that long ago. While some of those people are entitled to social housing, some are not and will never get social housing. They could be in emergency accommodation for an indeterminate period. That would not have been the case if we were talking about this in 2010, 2012 or 2014, or certainly not to the same extent.

Deputy Tóibín asked about our housing targets for 2023. Overall, we expect to exceed the targets. We will build more than 29,000 new homes in Ireland this year. It is too early to say whether we will meet every sub-target - the targets for social housing, affordable housing, private housing, etc. - but I can say that we will exceed the overall target.

We discussed Deputy Cian O'Callaghan's Bill, the tenancy protection Bill, at Cabinet on Tuesday. We will not oppose it. There are some issues that need to be teased out and the Minister of State, Deputy O'Donnell, will set those out in the debate. Hopefully, we can then tease them out on Committee Stage.

See this speech in context