The government has been accused of an “obfuscation, if not corruption” of homelessness figures in Ireland, a report published by the European Commission has warned.

The report claimed the Irish state had potentially inflated its success in fighting homelessness by “double-counting” some people being re-housed.

The paper, drafted for the Commission by Oxford professor Mary Daly, said that Ireland’s homelessness statistics were “unreliable and incomplete”. She said the situation was hampering...