James Browne (Wexford, Fianna Fail)

As the Deputy rightly points out, there is significant additional funding for homelessness in yesterday’s budget. As the Deputy knows, budgets are always broad strokes. You are dealing with multiple Departments and within those Departments there are multiple areas. I will, through the Revised Estimates Volume, work out exactly how we will allocate this funding and how we will use it. In particular, the homeless prevention framework will be absolutely key to preventing people going into homelessness. We cannot address homelessness as a homogenous group. People are becoming homeless for different reasons. The most common and most frequent reason is notices to quit. That is why we are introducing the reforms in the rental sector to give renters security of tenure, which is critical to bringing us in line with the rest of Europe, but there are also other measures to increase delivery on social housing by as much as possible and as quickly as possible. As that will not end homelessness immediately, we will also have funding for those who are in homelessness, along with prevention and exit measures. This is a multifaceted approach to address homelessness.

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