Dr. Peter Stafford:

I will discuss the statistics and perhaps my colleagues will comment on the issues relating to NAMA and social housing. One of the legacies of the Celtic tiger is that when the crash occurred, we realised we had very poor data in respect of the property market. The Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government collects some data on house-building activity and the Central Statistics Office collects certain other data. Various agencies examine different parts of this data but it is extremely difficult to mesh it all together in order to obtain an overall picture of the position with regard to supply and demand at any one time. The Construction 2020 report, which the Government produced a couple of months ago, has at its heart an evidence-based property market. This is something that we have absolutely been calling for all the way through. We are of the view that there should be task forces, forums and committees established and that everybody responsible for collecting data on anything to do with the market should contribute to these in order that said data might be analysed in real time.

There are two practical problems. First, the data from the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government is often very slow to be released. We do not yet have commencement notices for -----