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

-----because the rents are very easy to understand because in the old days ... and you spoke about the traditional banking model that seemed to have went out the window, the traditional banking model was based upon somebody's income multiplied by a modest amount. If they're cohabiting there's another income, and that's done over a 20-year period. But the calculation for rents historically has also been about the ... 12 times the value of the property. So it would work ... there was a calculation process there, so if the price of a house went up, rent would go up as well as ... because if I was purchasing a house in the morning in the buy-to-let market, as a second-hand house, the valuation of that, usually, would be a multiple of an annual rent by 12. So if I was paying €10,000 a year in rent, I would multiply that by 12 and the house should be worth about €120,000. That was the old sort of model as well.

So on that basis, because house prices were going up, it was inevitable that rent was going to go up because it was actually tied in with price.