Eoghan Murphy (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome that the Deputy has recognised that the delivery of affordable housing is coming and is welcome under Rebuilding Ireland. It is happening now and we are on sites. Obviously we want it to happen more quickly but with cost rental in particular we must make sure the finances add up. We would not want a person securing a rent for ten or 15 years or for longer, only to then find that five or ten years down the line, the rents must increase because somebody had made a mistake in the early stages of the process.

Many of the fundamentals of private house building are the same for public house building, which are the construction costs and so on. When we talk about what a discount might be or a discount on market rates it is just a way of putting it into a perspective that most people understand. The reason we can talk about that is because these homes will not be at a market rate and will not have other aspects built in, such as profit or risk. They will, however, have built in the maintenance and upkeep of the building over time with regard to the asset degrading over time. This is why we refer to a below-market rate in that sense.

I was not quite clear about the Deputy's point on deposits. If a house is to be sold at approximately €225,000 for example, a deposit of 10% would be around €25,000. The help-to-buy incentive could help with a large chunk of that. On the EIB issue, we are looking for long-term finance from the European Investment Bank. We already have them as a hired consultant to help us ensure we get the work right now. This will help us to achieve lower rents that might otherwise not have been available if we had not gone through the EIB mechanism.

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