On Friday, the Taoiseach's Government broke another shameful record. Over 13,000 people are now homeless in this State. Nearly 4,000 of those are children. Behind those numbers are real lives damaged by the housing crisis and childhoods stolen as kids grow up in hotels, bed and breakfast accommodation and hubs instead of a place they can truly call home. This awful experience is the sharp edge of the failure of the Government's housing policy. It is a living nightmare for people.

I would like the Taoiseach to set out today what the Government will do to bring this crisis to an end. Where is the emergency response, the extraordinary response required to meet the seriousness of this situation now, without further delay? The first thing the Government needs to do is reinstate the ban on no-fault evictions. Will the Government do that?

We do not intend to do that. The number of people in emergency accommodation continued to rise when the ban was in place. All it does, unfortunately, is make the problem worse later. There is no one solution, but the main solution, we believe, is to continue to accelerate the construction of social housing and public housing. I believe this year will be a record year for the amount of social and public housing built, the highest, certainly, since the mid-seventies.

It was a desperate week. Due to the horror of the attack and subsequent riot in Dublin on Thursday, undoubtedly the homelessness figures were pushed down the political agenda, but I also want to raise the matter because it was a very sad milestone for our country to see over 13,000 people now recorded as homeless, nearly 4,000 of whom are children. I too ask what the Government is doing about it because there is a sense from the Government of almost a helplessness and a lack of control. Just as policing was out of control on Thursday night, it seems there is no sense that the Government has homelessness under control.

If the Government is not proposing to reintroduce the temporary no-fault eviction ban this winter, what does it propose to do to help those who are now in homelessness, those families in emergency accommodation as we speak, and to help the rough sleepers on the streets of our capital city and other cities around the country? What is the Government going to do to protect those who are renting and now in fear of entering homelessness as they face the prospect of eviction during the winter months ahead? What does the Government propose to do?

I thank the Deputy. Just over 13,000 people are in receipt of emergency accommodation from the State at the moment. It is not the same 13,000 people all the time, as the Deputy knows. There are people coming into homelessness and others going out of homelessness. Our objective is to ensure homelessness is rare, that it is not repeated and that when it occurs, it is short lived. At the moment, people who experience homelessness spend roughly six to nine months in homelessness. That is a long time, particularly for a child, and the best thing we can do is to speed up the provision of social housing so we have options and can get people into secure tenancies as quickly as possible.