Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Yes. I have a couple of more questions and the first one is on rent caps. I am not in favour of pumping rent allowance into the pockets of private landlords but rents are spiralling. Should we vary rent caps in the short term?

Community welfare officers are restricted to a rent allowance cap. Can the council confirm that the councils in RAS arrangements often pay way over the cap in order to keep landlords and stop them walking away from RAS arrangements? If the council can breach the cap but individuals cannot get the community welfare officer to do so then that is double standards which is a crazy scenario. I also want to know what the delegations think of long-term leasing arrangements.

As the council people cannot comment on policy and so on I shall direct my last question at the McVerry Trust. What does the trust think about the re-introduction of property-based tax reliefs to encourage speculation, as I would describe it, in the property sector through, for example, real estate investment trusts? Does the trust consider, as I do, the initiative to be a worrying return to the practices around property that helped produce the crash in the first place?