Cabinet Committees Dail Éireann — 2023-07-05 ============================================================ Réada Cronin (SF), Kildare North The housing crisis has changed to a housing disaster, as the rocketing rents and record homelessness figures show. We have reached a watershed in this country where having a job and going to work no longer guarantees you a roof over your head, whether to rent or buy. The social contract is not the only thing broken; the people coming to my constituency office are broken too. In the past year, homelessness is up by 20%, and 22% for children, but as bad as these statistics are, they do not show the people who couch-surf, that is, who go out to work and pay their PRSI, USC and other tax while sleeping on friends’ floors. Nor do they show the women and children sleeping in domestic violence centres. The social contract is broken. When will the Taoiseach act as Taoiseach instead of merely commenting on the housing crisis? --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2023-07-05/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:52:07+00:00 Sitting date: 2023-07-05