HOUSING MINISTER JAMES Browne has admitted that the government has no estimates for when homeless numbers may fall and if the coalition’s strategy is working.
The Fianna Fáil minister said that the number of people without a home is “not going to come down immediately, but they might level off”, although he accepted that he does not have any projections mapping out when this might happen.
Speaking on Monday with Gavan Reilly on Virgin Media, he said that it’s “very difficult to model” when homeless numbers will fall and that instead it is “more important” to put in place a framework to “maximise the delivery of homes” by changing construction regulations to potentially make building easier.
— Virgin Media News (@VirginMediaNews) June 22, 2026🗣️ “You’re saying it’s effectively impossible to model, so you’re not going to try?”
Housing Minister James Browne was pressed on when homelessness figures might plateau or begin to fall, ahead of the latest figures due on Friday. pic.twitter.com/gRdzugSWHJ
The number of people recorded as homeless has been reaching a new record month after month this year, hitting a high of 17,548 last month.
That high followed a 51% jump in eviction notices issued in the first quarter of this year, which coincided with Browne’s sweeping changes to the rental sector from 1 March.
On Monday night, Browne defended himself against the lack of any modelling on this aspect of the housing crisis.
The host told Browne that some people may be “having a little difficulty in having faith in your government’s ability to get on top of this”, when “even the minister doesn’t have models to suggest when things might level off or when you might think they might come down”, after several years of increases.
Asking the minister directly when Ireland might at least see a plateauing of homeless numbers, Browne said it’s “a hard numbers game” to know exactly.
“Unfortunately, it’s when the number of homes being delivered exceeds the number of people who need homes in terms of our population increase, and we’ve seen a significant increase in our population,” Browne said.
“I don’t think it’s a timing thing, it is a numbers thing.”
He added that the government delivered more than 36,000 homes last year, which was an over 20% increase, and delivered the largest number of social homes built in the history of the state last year as well, and
“But we have to do an awful lot more to accelerate the delivery and increase delivery year-on-year,” Browne added.
Reilly next put it to Browne that the government must have “projections of what the delivery is going to be”, given it has a raft of data available, including commencement notices and planning pre-approvals.
In response, Browne said that he found that previous expert reports on projections on housing were wrong, leading him to “move away from targets” when he took up the cabinet position last year.
“When I became minister for housing, I looked back at all the different projections there have been over the previous years by experts,” he said.
“They vary quite widely and they’re often very wrong, and so that’s why I wanted to move away from targets. And actually, what is more important is putting that framework in place to maximise the delivery of homes.”
Supply
At the core of the government’s argument for how to deal with the housing crisis has been that it needs to increase supply of new housing at a far greater rate.
This was behind moves to simply the regulations for apartment buildings and for a recent push for more one-off housing.
Critics have disputed whether this is the right approach, while some supporters of the government’s argument have voiced doubt over whether Ireland’s construction sector can build at the large-scale fast enough to meet demand and ease homelessness and other major aspects of the crisis.
There have also been signs that there has yet to be any major pickup in construction from the private sector, with a recent housing summit heard that there are 40,000 apartments with planning permission that have yet to see any building, mainly due to financing issues.