Ciarán Lynch (Cork South Central, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Coming back to ... and at the same time, affordability, which was going up, and I'll come back to in a moment, but the ... if you look at the graph that's in front of you there, particularly the bottom one, residential house prices quarterly, and this refers to the root question that I was talking about, which is the unwinding of some of the implemented changes. If you look there at quarter ... it's quarter 1, 2001 to quarter 1, 2002. The ... this is the period in which the Bacon report measures are implemented and we see there was a significant increase in property prices and then it plateaus and even begins to drop somewhat over that annualised period. Then we see the removal of the measures and we see house prices escalating very, very rapidly right up until 2007, both in the blue line, which is the new house prices, and in the red line, which is in the second house price market ... coming back to our earlier discussion of today with regard to affordability. Given an examination of that graph, did the removal of those Bacon measures make house prices more unaffordable for people on average incomes? These are average house prices.