TAOISEACH LEO VARADKAR has said the Government has no proposals to cap the number of times people refuse an offer of social housing.

He said that, in the past two years, 5,000 people on a social housing waiting list had turned down an offer, adding that “they had the right to do so”.

Varadkar has been criticised after stating that there are “plenty of cases” in his Dublin West constituency where people in emergency accommodation for years have turned down “multiple offers of accommodation”.

In the Dáil today, Sinn Féin TD Pearse Doherty accused Varadkar of attempting to “shift blame” away from the government’s housing policies.

Varadkar said he had been misrepresented but amended his comment regarding the amount of people in emergency accommodation refusing social housing from “plenty” to “some”.

When asked whether he believed there should be a cap on the number of times a person can refuse offers of social housing, Varadkar replied “I don’t”.

“The situation is that, in the past two years, about 5,000 people on the housing list have turned down an offer of social housing, and they had the right to do so.

“The reasons are documented, sometimes they’re good reasons, sometimes they’re not. But we do allow people the right to refuse.

“One of the best things we’ve brought in in recent years is a system called choice-based letting. So instead of offering somebody a property which they can then accept or reject, they can look at what’s available, and then be the ones that then make an offer for that property. I think that’s worked a lot better.

“But we don’t have any proposals to cap the number of times people can refuse. But it is the case that it is a fact that in the last two years about 5,000 people have refused, often, for good reasons, maybe not always.”

While giving an update on the government’s housing for all policy yesterday the Taoiseach defended the government’s action on tackling the housing crisis and said he measures success on things that can be controlled rather than homelessness figures alone.

Figures from the Department of Housing show that homelessness figures have topped their previous record, with 12,411 people in emergency accommodation in May.