Since this Government took office, it has not come remotely close to meeting its targets on affordable housing. This year, the Government promised to deliver 5,500 affordable homes. In the first half of the year, just 22 cost-rental and 101 affordable purchase homes were completed. The Land Development Agency, LDA, did not complete a single affordable home. More than 500,000 adults are living in their childhood bedrooms. Does the Taoiseach believe the Government will meet its affordable housing targets this year? Will he support the Social Democrats' proposal to provide early-stage financing for affordable housing projects so that planning and design costs can be met?

When it comes to housing, delivery figures tend to be lower at the start of the year and increase throughout the course of the year. We are helping people to buy their first homes in many ways. There is the help to buy scheme, which must be factored in, the first home scheme, which is very popular, and vacancy grants for turning derelict properties into use. There are also local authority home loans. There are many ways in which we are helping people to buy their first homes. It is important that those are included in the figures.

The Deputy was right; it is the case that roughly 500,000 people still live at home. It is roughly one in seven or one in eight adults. It was much the same ten or 15 years ago. Included in that are people who are students and people who are 18 and still in school but the Deputy did not say that part of it.

In February, the Dáil passed the People Before Profit Eviction Ban Bill 2022, which would reinstate an emergency ban on no-fault evictions for the duration of the housing and homelessness emergency. Tomorrow, during our Private Members' time, we will ask that the Dáil expedite that Bill. Whatever the Taoiseach may have said back in February during the debate or since or to justify the decision to lift the ban, the situation has got catastrophically worse. Since then, more than 1,000 extra people have ended up in emergency accommodation, including an additional 400 children. The number of notices to quit issued in the second quarter of this year jumped by 21% compared to the previous period, up to 5,759. It is getting worse every single week.

Families, individuals and children are being driven into the trauma of homelessness. Will the Taoiseach reconsider and support our motion to expedite the reinstatement of a no-fault eviction ban as we head into the winter months?

We will not be supporting it. There were two no-fault eviction bans in recent history. Both happened while I was in government. The last one did not work. Homelessness increased and the number of people in emergency accommodation increased for almost every month that it was in situ. It just deferred homelessness and made a bad situation worse later. That is not a solution. The solution is more supply of housing in general and more supply of social housing in particular. I am glad that last year we built more social housing than in any year since the 1970s and we are going to break that record again this year.