In 2019, when the number of people living in homeless emergency accommodation exceeded 10,000 for the first time, the Minister denounced the Fine Gael Government for shattering yet another record. He went on to say this could not continue and promised Fianna Fáil would fix the housing crisis. He is now coming towards the end of his term as Minister for housing and there are now 14,429 people living in emergency homeless accommodation. Shamefully, this includes 4,401 children who are growing up without a home. That is a staggering increase of 66% since the Minister took office. At the same time under his watch, there are local authorities that have not been turning around social homes for more than a year. In Limerick, for example, social homes have been sitting empty for an average of 62 weeks before being re-let. How is it that the Minister has not tackled the scandalous waste of social housing in his term in office?

I referred to this earlier. We had Priority Questions today and questions to the Ministers responsible for housing. I note that we had no questions in from the Social Democrats this morning with regard to housing.

We did not have Priority Questions.

They had no questions in at all on the topic.

The Minister should look at the questions paper. That is not true.

All right. I withdraw that. My apologies.

To answer the Deputy's question, we need to continue to increase housing output, and we are doing that. Many challenges remain but, unquestionably, we have taken a step up. We need to deliver more social homes and we are doing that. We are doing it in our own area of Fingal, even with continued objections to one of our biggest schemes from the Social Democrats. Balmoston in Donabate-----

That is not true.

One thousand two hundred homes-----

Just not true.

-----the Deputy's party voted against.

That is absolutely not true. We wanted all of them to be affordable.

The Deputy's party voted against 253 affordable and 253 social homes, so what I would say-----

Not true. We wanted them all to be affordable. We did not want it sold to a private developer.

If the Deputy really wants to help, he should stop objecting-----

That is not an objection.

-----to homes in his own constituency,-----

Untrue, untrue, untrue.

-----stop objecting to homes across Fingal and support the Government in the provision of social homes.

The Minister should answer the question.