Ms Michelle Murphy:

That would not happen until we had sufficient supply, at the point where we would have a huge amount of mixed housing stock. The differential rent would be removed once we had sufficient supply. We could still move to a cost rental system which is below market rate, but the approved housing bodies managing those properties would generate enough income to both maintain and develop the properties. The problem currently is that when the Government funding and capital expenditure people are totally reliant on disappears, local authorities do not even have the money to maintain their stock.

On the point made by Deputy Durkan, the local authorities do have expertise in terms of building social housing units and this needs to be brought into play. We have always advocated using some of the money available from the Irish League of Credit Unions and to use that money in the markets to generate the funding required.

Deputy Coppinger asked about the fiscal rules. It is correct that the fiscal rules do not prohibit spending if commensurate revenue is raised. There is also a possibility to tweak the fiscal rules in terms of spending on social infrastructure and there is nothing to stop the Government from increasing revenue in order to generate expenditure to fund social housing. The issue is the scale of the problem. If we are to eliminate the waiting lists and build the units required, we need expenditure of approximately €10 billion. It would be very difficult to raise revenue of that amount over the lifetime of the Government just to fund social housing. We fully support the idea of increasing Government revenue to fund current expenditure and the ongoing expenditure related to social housing - HAP, rent supplement, maintenance of the stock, the education and health systems - but it would be very difficult to generate that amount of revenue to build the units required in the timescale we have.