A decision on whether or not to extend the ban on no-fault evictions would be taken before the St Patrick's Day break, the Taoiseach has said.
Speaking in Ballinasloe, Co Galway, Leo Varadkar said the Government had hoped that the ban - which has been in place since November - would see the number of people in emergency accommodation fall.
However, that has not been the case with the latest figures showing that the number of people homeless has risen for a seventh consecutive month.
Mr Varadkar said the Government has not decided yet on whether or not to extend the ban. He also claimed that the ban has had unintended consequences for some Irish people returning from abroad.
"Some 30,000 Irish people come home every year from abroad, from Australia, from Dubai, from Britain," he said.
"Some of them own homes but they can't back into them at the moment because of the ban.2
Earlier the Chief Executive of homeless charity Threshold said that if the ban were to be extended, there could be a "long-term threat" to the supply of the private rental sector housing market by small landlords.
John Mark McCafferty said that due to the uncertainty caused by the ban, they may decide further to sell up and leave the sector.
"Maybe not now, but maybe in six months or two years' time," he told RTÉ's Morning Ireland.
"And there's a very high risk of there being less private rented sector housing supply, which is obviously bad news for renters."
He said that this was "an impossible choice, in terms of the eviction ban".
Yesterday Tánaiste Micheál Martin gave the strongest indication yet that the Government is unlikely to extend the ban.
He told the Dáil that any extension could not be "short-term", and the "fundamental" question was whether it would negatively impact the supply of housing.
Mr McCafferty said the sense is that the homeless figures "would have been even worse" had the ban not been in place.
He said that if the ban comes to an end at the end of March, families and individuals will be evicted at certain points after that, and it will be probably due to landlord selling.
"So, families in this situation will have fewer new options and there'll be few housing alternatives out there in the market," he said.
"Local authorities are maxed out and have little or no emergency accommodation and add to that the end of March sees the start of the tourist season.
"So, housing homeless families in hotels will be less of an option."
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Mr McCafferty said that means that more families and individuals will lose their homes in the private rental sector and "rely on the mercy of family or friends to sleep on a sofa or a floor, or even worse".
He said this is a choice between increased homelessness in the next couple of months or sustained and further increased homelessness in the next couple of years as more small-scale landlords who house people on middle and lower incomes sell up and leave the private rental sector.
Threshold argued that the ban could provide a breather for positive changes in the market and improvements in supply.
However, as homelessness has increased, he said ending the ban "will make a bad situation worse in the short term".
More supports for tenants and landlords will be needed at this juncture, he added.
"We all know that supply is the thing that will eventually shift this. There are other kinds of measures in in the short term, but supply is absolutely critical and thinking differently about supply is really important," he said.
"But there are obstacles and we're not necessarily going to get the kind of solutions that really are needed."
Mr McCafferty said that the question is can the Government give assurances that there will be enough emergency accommodation in local authorities to host the families and individuals who lose their rented homes after the ban is lifted.
Because, "once the ban is lifted that is what will happen."
He added that his sense is from local authorities either funding or providing emergency accommodation, that they are running out of options.
"We are moving back into the tourist season, so it's an impossible decision for Government and it's a really, really difficult situation facing both tenants and landlords", he said.
Minister of State Department of Agriculture Pippa Hackett said that "nothing has been decided" while the relevant ministers and attorney general were going through legal and policy areas to access impacts and, she added, it was important to wait for that.
Speaking on RTÉ's Today with Claire Byrne, she said that the eviction ban has been very helpful, but there may be unintended consequences of extending it.
Ms Hackett said that those in Government know that they need to act fast, but also had to be careful, as there are a significant number of landlords leaving the market and that is a concern as it will cause rent increases, so it is about increasing supply.
She added that nobody wants to lift it and see a flooding of people on the street.
Speaking on the same programme, TD Brid Smith of People Before Profit said that there are some hard cases, but if the ban is lifted, thr consequence will be a tsunami of evictions and "there’s nowhere for them to go " as emergency accommodation is so packed-up .
Sinn Féin calls for ban to be extended
Sinn Féin's housing spokesperson has also called on the Government to extend the ban on evictions "until the end of the year".
Eoin Ó Broin described the rise in homelessness during the emergency ban on evictions as particularly troubling.
He pointed out that single-person homelessness and family homelessness has risen.
Mr Ó Broin said the figures show the Government's failure "to use the breathing space created by the ban to reduce the number of people becoming homelessness and to increase the number of people existing emergency accommodation to secure housing".
He called for an acceleration of the councils' tenant-in-situ scheme and its expansion to include cost rental.
"We need the Minister to use emergency planning and procurement powers to target vacant properties and new building technologies to increase and accelerate the delivery of additional social and affordable homes," he said.
The Social Democrats housing spokesperson said the Government had no choice but to extend the ban, otherwise he said there would be a flood of evictions at the end of March.
Cian O'Callaghan said this kind of emergency measure was needed to get to grips with the crisis.
"Ultimately, stop/start temporary eviction bans are not the way forward as they do nothing to address the underlying insecurity faced by renters," he said.
