Ivana Bacik (Dublin Bay South, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Last Friday marked a new and very troubling record on homelessness. We saw that 13,531 people on the homelessness list are now in emergency accommodation, more than 4,000 of whom are children. That is a really stark figure. Each one is an individual tragedy. In Dublin alone, nearly 10,000 are homeless and yet we are seeing simply no sense of urgency or ambition from Government in tackling the issue. Its house building targets are too low. The Taoiseach has acknowledged that to me in the past. The Government's renters' rights protections are too weak. As the Dublin Simon Community has said, the tenant in situtargets are also too low.

On renters' rights, last week I raised with the Tánaiste the scandalous practices of landlord and investor Marc Godart, who is trammelling renters' protections and employment laws. Despite this, today we see more revelations from Colm Keena of The Irish Times. He reports that two of Godart's companies said in their filings that they lodged all of their income through Dublin ATMs. What is the Minister's Government doing to address this?

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