Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The homeless figures:

make grim reading with no progress made in terms of stemming the flow of families presenting as homeless or moving people out of emergency accommodation into long term housing. Consistent increases in the overall homelessness numbers over the past five years despite regular announcements of plans and strategies have destroyed confidence in the ability of the political system to deliver.

Those are not my words. Those are the Minister's words in 2018.

It is not the case that more than 40% of people in emergency accommodation to not have an entitlement to social housing. The facts of the matter are 40% do not have a social housing application at the point at which they become homeless.

But the majority of those people, and this is directly from the Dublin Region Homeless Executive, go on to apply and get successfully accepted as having a social housing need. The Minister is deliberately misleading the House to distract from the fact that as long as he has been Minister, homelessness continues to rise. What did he say when Eoghan Murphy was raising homelessness? He said "You can't really blame citizens for feeling disenchanted with the political system that continually fails on an issue that, to most people, is easy to fix." Yet here he says it is complex. He is responsible for record levels of homelessness. Is he going to do anything different this year to tackle a problem that he, since taking office, has made worse?

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