A figure of 357 homeless people have died in the last five years in Dublin. That is the equivalent loss of life of a transatlantic flight falling from the sky. It is a catastrophe that is happening silently and invisibly every other day on the streets in which we live. There were 47 deaths across homeless services in Dublin in 2018, 49 in 2019 and 76 in 2020. Last year, in 2021, incredibly, 115 people died in homeless services. So far this year, 70 people are recorded to have lost their lives in the Dublin homeless services. It does not bear thinking about but those figures are set to increase due to the fact that the weather is going to get colder and more severe over the next number of months.

These figures were released to Aontú by Dublin City Council under the Freedom of Information Act. If we were to submit the same question to any other local authority in Ireland right now, however, we would be met with stony silence because no other local authority actually records the number of people who die in homelessness around the country. It is an incredible thing that the vast majority of local authorities are not even recording this. It is an absolute scandal. If we are not even measuring this incredible situation, how will we ever get to a situation where we are finding solutions to it?

I have been raising this issue of homeless deaths for the last number of years and different Ministers with responsibility for housing have tried to explain it away. Some said these deaths are just part of a natural attrition that happens. Others said these are the results of car accidents etc. The truth be told, however, and the Taoiseach should know this, homelessness is a direct cause of death. People who are homeless for longer than 18 months are eight times more likely to die than a person who is homeless for less than six months. Right now, on the streets of our capital city, people are dying directly as a result of homelessness.

When I raised this matter previously, the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage commissioned Dr. Austin O'Carroll, a north inner city GP, to research the causes of these deaths and propose solutions. I welcome the fact that this happened. If the Taoiseach looks at the figures, he will see that there is little evidence we are getting to grips with this crisis. The Government is missing all of its housing targets. The Dublin Housing Delivery Group submitted a report to the Minister recently indicating that there is evidence of a slowdown in social housing projects and that work has ceased on some sites.

This is a record-breaking Government for all the wrong reasons. There are record numbers of people accessing emergency accommodation. There are record numbers of children accessing emergency accommodation. House prices are at record levels. Rents are at record levels and last year we had a record for the number of people who died in homelessness in our capital city. All of these indicators are going the wrong way under Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Green Party in government. Will the Taoiseach commit to recording the number of deaths of homeless people in every county and will he detail the progress so far on the implementation of the recommendations made in the Interim Report on Mortality in Single Homeless Population 2020?

The death of anyone who is homeless is a tragedy. We extend our sympathies to the families concerned. I refer, in particular, to the deaths of people availing of homeless services. That matter is taken very seriously. The Deputy made a fairly bald statement in the context of offering an almost a direct juxtaposition between the numbers who have died and the position regarding homelessness. I do not think the figures bear that out. The Deputy quoted the Dublin Region Homeless Executive, DRHE, records. That organisation records death notifications from all of its funded residential and outreach services in line with a procedural agreement with the Health Service Executive. These services include support for people in permanent tenancy - people who have been taken out of homelessness but are in permanent tenancies - including Housing First, for example, long-term supported accommodation and people receiving tenancy support who are not counted in the Department's homeless figures. We have to be very careful. Is the Deputy saying that all of those deaths occurred because people were homeless? Not necessarily; that is the point. Also, homelessness is a complex issue and we must take into account the range of issues that can lead to someone becoming homeless. Some 37 of the 70 deaths the Deputy identified were in the categories I have just mentioned. In other words, they related to people in permanent tenancies and not in a state of homelessness. Nonetheless, it is still extremely sad and tragic that anyone would lose their life but I do not have the specific causes of death for those 37 people. To be fair to everyone, perhaps more research is required in respect of those figures before we draw the conclusions the Deputy seems to be drawing in respect of the figures he articulated.

I believe all local authorities should follow the example of the DRHE in how it records people within its homeless services. As the Deputy knows, we are moving much more towards the Housing First approach to homelessness which is actually giving people a permanent tenancy almost from day one if that is possible. We just need to be very careful in terms of how we describe this and how we analyse and research it. That is all I would say in that regard.

There is a pilot study on data collection of homeless deaths nationally which has been undertaken by the Health Research Board on behalf of the Department of Health. The Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage is liaising with the Department of Health and the Health Research Board on this study. I will talk to the Ministers for Health and Housing, Local Government and Heritage to see if anything more needs to be added to that research in order to get as complete a picture as we possibly can. The research is very important because it can inform policy. We saw during Covid how a strong synergy between those two Departments on homelessness reaped significant dividends for the homeless in the context of a positive response on the Covid issue.

I am surprised at the Taoiseach. These figures are very stark and real. There are direct correlations between being homeless and losing one's life. Equivocating or fudging at this point in 2022, after years of this, is simply not good enough.

Ten or 15 years ago, the Government might have had an excuse for doing so. However, equivocating on these figures, the direct correlation and the cause and effect that is happening on the streets of Dublin is wrong at this point. If that is the stage the Government is at, it surely will be a problem in terms of urgently putting resources in place to fix the situation. Dr. O'Carroll, who was commissioned by the Minister, said that the length of time for which a person is homeless leads directly to an increased chance of mortality. We know the number of people dying correlates exactly with the number who are homeless. The truth is that people do not have access to primary care, mental health services and dual diagnosis services. They are living in conditions where they are exposed to the weather, to violence on the streets, alcoholism, etc. All of those issues are contributing factors to the deaths that are occurring.

Thank you, Deputy. We are over time.

The Government is not contributing to solving these issues by way of any real effort or urgency.

The Taoiseach to respond.

What actions is the Government taking to make sure this problem is solved and lives are saved?

More than 20 years ago, we put a facility together that married health, housing and homelessness in a centre on Anderson's Quay in Cork city, where we gave access to primary care, mental healthcare and homeless services. What the Deputy is saying is not quite true.

People with houses do not have access to primary care-----

Deputy, please.

It has long been recognised that people who are homeless for a variety of reasons-----

Has the Taoiseach seen what is happening in child and adolescent mental health services?

The Deputy introduced politics into this at the beginning, which is fine. I am just making the point that there is a multiplicity of reasons someone ends up homeless. We cannot generalise to the degree he is perhaps doing. Some, without doubt, have significant challenges as they become homeless, which can lead to increased morbidity and mortality. The point I am trying to make is that we have to bring the services to the homeless. That is what we need to do as a State, by intervening in a positive way in a person's mental health and medical issues, and we need to do that by proper integration of services on the front line.

The Deputy referred to primary care. It was explained to me by homeless services a long time ago that many people who are homeless do not bother getting the medical card and do not have GPs.

Thank you, Taoiseach.

What do we do? We bring the GP and the primary care service to the homeless centre or we at least provide it in an accessible way. In my view, there is a way of dealing with this, we are committed to doing it and unprecedented resources have been allocated to it. It was done very well during the Covid period, and we want to try to maintain that.