Housing Minister Eoghan Murphy is doing all he can to fix the crisis.

But as we learned yesterday, the problem is only getting worse.

Murphy broke his silence yesterday after refusing to come home from his holidays to address the situation of a young family being forced to sleep in a Garda station.

Murphy, speaking on RTÉ radio to Miriam O’Callaghan, conceded that despite all that is being done, the number of officially recorded homeless people is expected to rise again from the June figure of 9,872, including 3,824 children.

“I don’t have them [homeless figures for July] yet. We’re still compiling them. My understanding is that they will be slightly up because we are, again, seeing an increase in presentations,” said Murphy.

“My understanding is that the figures have gone up in one particular region which would give me reason to believe that actually they’ll be up overall.”

O’Callaghan asked him will they exceed the 10,000 figure. His response was extraordinarily blasé: “Whether or not they hit 10,000 this month, I can’t be certain now… Hitting 10,000 doesn’t tell us anything that hitting 9,000 didn’t

tell us, which is that we have a very serious crisis," he said.

So what does the minister say is the cause of the problem and what is being done? “What we have at the moment is a very acute supply problem, which is being corrected and we can go into that in some detail in relation to the CSO figures.

“What we saw for the last quarter was about 4,500 new homes were completed. What we actually need to achieve is somewhere between 6,000 and 8,500 new homes being completed every quarter and then that continuing for a steady period of time.”

It was put to him that not enough is being done and that there is a clear impression he and the Government are unable to deal with, or are indifferent to, the problem.

“We have to move away from these violent swings in our housing output where we go from 90,000 — which is twice too many — people’s properties being overvalued and people then falling into massive negative equity and then, in a few short years, people living in cramped accommodation, trying to raise a family,” he said.

In the midst of his grilling, Murphy made an important admission — he gave a firm figure of how many actual social houses were built last year. Not target, but built.

The answer was 2,400. That is all. At a time when 10 times that amount is needed.

He stressed that another 4,400 will be built this year and claimed he and the Government will “hit our target for increasing the stock of social housing by 50,000 by 2021”.

He said that some county councils have utterly failed to build adequate social housing, and had they done so, the country would not be in the crisis in which it finds itself.

Murphy said that when councils stopped building, it fell to the private sector to plug the gap.

He said because of this inability of some councils to get their act together, the Government is now over-reliant on the same private sector to fix the problem. The end result is a more expensive bad policy for which the taxpayer has to pay.

Then, incredibly, Murphy went on to say that attacks on him for being a “posh boy” from within Cabinet are merely because his policies are working. “The reason you are seeing the focus on me as a person is because the policies are working.”

We reported last week that some Fine Gael ministers fear their “posh boy” image and failure to solve the housing crisis will “kill” their election hopes.

“It doesn’t matter where I’m from or where I grew up or how I dress or how I look or how I speak — none of these things matter and people who, serious people really who shouldn’t entertain those types of ideas but, unfortunately, some of our politicians and some of our commentators are.

“What matters is, are our policies working? If people think the problem or our housing crisis is the fact that I am a posh boy from Dublin 4, then they are missing the mark completely.”

Criticisms of Murphy from within Fine Gael, naturally enough, centred around its political chances of retaining power after the next general election.

Some have criticised his failure even to keep stakeholders like Fr Peter McVerry and Sr Stan onside while the issue of supply is being tackled.

“Jesus, even Alan Kelly managed to do that,” said one minister.

Murphy is now the minister under the most heat. Heading into winter, he needs to see some progress or at least stop the rot, before it is his head people will be calling for.

If these numbers continue, such calls will be entirely justified.