Mr. Micheál Mahon:

As chair of the quantity surveying professional group, quantity surveyors deal with costs of buildings. While in the past there was a major focus, in light of the Central Bank loan to income ratio, on the actual cost of building houses, if we take it that there is a limit on the Central Bank rules on loan to income, to get equilibrium we need the developers to be able to provide the units and achieve a margin within that space. The problem, and it is a problem across the industry, is that we are relying a great deal on anecdotal evidence. To digress slightly, one of the measures we have sought for quite a while is a Minister for construction who can collate real-time, independent information and monitor the effectiveness of measures that are introduced. That is an aside but returning to the housing cost, we have undertaken a detailed study of housing cost across the greater Dublin area. That study will be issued by the end of next week but in terms of the methodology we adopted, we took ten live housing projects in which our members were involved and collated the data from that. I will not disclose the-----