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

I once again restate the Government has the confidence of the Dáil and it will continue its work, albeit under a new Taoiseach and a new leader of my party. Obviously, the leaders of the other parties will remain the same. The Government will focus on the work at hand. I acknowledge the appalling scourge on our society that homelessness is and how shameful it is. I also acknowledge the complexity of the problem and the different causes underlying it, which are varied and are certainly about much more than the availability of housing stock. The Deputy just needs to read the reports and information to know the number of different causes, the complexity behind it and how difficult it is to deal with. We are doing the best we can on it, particularly by ramping up social housing to levels we have not seen since the 1970s and through programmes like Housing First. We understand that for some people who are homeless, it is housing first but they also need the wraparound supports. Those are things that work most successfully and that have really been pushed by this Government and the one that preceded it.

The Deputy is right to say there are far too many people on waiting lists. However, he did not say that the number of people waiting has now fallen for two years in a row and this will be the third year in which waiting lists fall. That is bucking the trend of what is happening north of the Border, in Britain and across the western world. That is not something to be diminished, discounted or reduced to nothing.

Deputy Boyd Barrett is wrong to say there is a return to mass emigration. That is just not the case. There are lots of people leaving and lots of people coming back. For most of the past three years, we have had roughly the same number of people who are Irish citizens returning to Ireland as we have had leaving. It is a different world. People are mobile and they go and come for all sorts of different reasons. When it comes to people from other parts of the world, we have immigration, with many more people choosing to come here from Britain, the rest of Europe and other parts of the world to work, study and build their lives here. Those are the facts and most people will know they are the facts.

I appreciate that there are lots of young adults living at home who do not want to be and who want their own home or to be able to afford to rent. However, the correct figures are that 13% - one in seven - of young adults are living at home. That is a big group, which includes people who are 18 and 19 years old and people who are at home for all sorts of different reasons. The figure is roughly the same as it was 2016 and 2011. It has not increased. The figure the Deputy used, of 68% of young adults living at home, is incorrect and comes from Eurostat data that has since been corrected. The correct figure for that age group is 33%.

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