Dr. Ronan Lyons:

I agree with the gist of much of what the Deputy is saying. If we take the income of a couple - the classic garda and nurse pairing - for example, their income does not vary at all from one area of the country to another as they are on public sector pay scales. For a family with €50,000 a year in gross income, to be sustainable, a house can cost no more, including land and everything, than €150,000. One can buy a house for less than that in many parts of the country but if it is not possible to build for that price - we will run into a problem in the future because of the increase in population. It is certain it is not possible to build for anything like that in Dublin. The image of renting for a certain generation is that of the bed-sit, a room in an old house; for the next generation it means paper-thin walls in an apartment built in the 1990s, somewhere along the quays. However, people in other countries live in rented accommodation for all their lives. In that case, they are good quality units in which anyone would wish to live. There are such actors in the Irish market now but unfortunately it is limited by the high cost and certain oddities relating to the minimum specification about lifts and stairwells and orientation and car parking spaces.