Mr. Patrick Davitt:

We have a consideration there as well. We only ask that specific balances be built behind the increasing of loan-to-income ratios from 3.5 to 4 or 4.5.

We believe there is a massive difference between the cost of building new properties and the cost of selling second-hand properties. We see the building costs. Nobody appears to know how much it costs to build a property. We have been asking for a long time, so we can work out the figures for the building costs. I am referring to the building costs, not the costs we can see such as the development levies and so forth. We can see what they are. I questioned the Minister for Finance about this recently at a meeting in Portlaoise and I have written to him about it because we need to know how much it costs to build a house.

There is apparently nobody in Ireland who can say how much it costs to build a house. We have asked numerous times about where the costs are. In our proposal, the committee will see that we came to the conclusion that it costs €100 per square foot to build a property. From talking to small and large builders throughout the country, that figure seems to be a reasonable amount of money to build a property. If that is the case and given the levels that those houses can be built at, we believe that young people who are seeking to buy properties, regardless of how much money they earn, will not able to buy those properties on the 3.5 loan-to-income, LTI, ratio. In those cases we believe the figures should be altered and changed upwards.