Mr. Conor Skehan:

First, we all have to acknowledge that. It must be put on the table that affordability is key to all our efforts going forward and we all must accept that it is too expensive. Second, the cost of housing is made up of a number of elements, all of which need to be separately examined. We hope to bring to the attention of the committee and others the work the agency is doing to examine how to value engineer down the various components. We take our inspiration from the electronics sector and people like Michael Dell who brought the cost of computers down from €5,000 to €4,000 to €1,000 to €500 a unit.

We think the same potential exists for the housing sector by examining the position in respect of things such as land. In the rest of Europe, land makes up 10% to 15% of the cost of a house. The figure is many times that in Ireland. We can examine elements to do with expectations of profit and the financing of the sector. As I heard Deputy Wallace say this morning, the financing costs of our deals are exorbitant and not affordable by many traditional developers.

One of the big issues, and this is a new thing for people to think about in Ireland, is scale. I also heard Deputy Wallace outline the fact there are many fine builders of a small scale all over Ireland but the reality is that the smaller the scale, the less easy it is to achieve economies of off-site construction and large scale purchasing. One of the main things we are saying is that for public and many other types of housing, with a transition to building at scale - I am talking about building in units of 500 at a go - one starts to get dramatic decreases in costs of things such as labour and mobilisation of skills and skilled labour. Those are the two big things, namely, land and scale, if I wanted to give the committee a simple one.

I cannot see it in front of me but in terms of detail, we have prepared a table of measures. Again, we have been listening to the questions the committee has been asking people during the week and we have identified 12 short and medium-term actions - really quick ones - that would increase and accelerate housing provision. We will leave those with the committee also today. However, on cost, there is no one thing. It is engineering down all of them, but scale is the big one.