Departmental Priorities
Dail Éireann — 2023-03-07
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Leo Varadkar (FG), Dublin West

----anywhere near emergency accommodation in that period. We also confirmed that we will lease an additional 1,000 social housing units, which will allow us to bring new social housing provision this year to something like 12,000 additional units. Probably more than one third of all new homes being provided in the State this year will be social housing. This has not been something we have commonly seen down the decades and it is certainly not an approach that is neoliberal, right-wing or any of the ideological nonsense we keep having thrown at us as a Government, which just does not stand up to the facts. We have also authorised additional student accommodation, with 400 units to be provided in Dublin City University, DCU.
Deputy Tóibín again mentioned the issue of people who have died while in contact with homeless services. I am happy to give him a note on this. He raised this before and I did answer it in a bit more detail on that occasion. As he said, these are not people who died on the streets but people who have been in contact with homeless services. They die for all sorts of different reasons, often in hospices and hospitals from medical conditions, but also often for other reasons, perhaps overdoses and sometimes violence, sadly, and sometimes we do not know the reasons. I can, however, give the Deputy a detailed note on this which can help to explain better what is meant by that figure.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2023-03-07/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:51:40+00:00
Sitting date: 2023-03-07