Mr. Gerard Brady:

What we have seen in the past is that the funding of social housing is procyclical. When the Government wants to cut, it cuts social housing along with the rest of the capital budget. The advantage of a single larger entity rather than 30 odd smaller entities is that one is able to get institutional funding, such as pension funds and the like, to invest through that body in an acyclical manner. One will be able to build at a time when the State is not able to finance the build. That is the main advantage of the Northern Ireland Housing Executive. Let me give the Deputy an example of how successful it has been. There are about 20 social houses for every person in the Republic of Ireland, there is about 35 houses for every person in the North. One would have an extra 100,000 houses in the North because they have continued to build even at times of fiscal constraint they are able to source outside funding because it is a larger body that is able to work with larger users. It is the same issue the local authorities face. Dublin probably does not face that issue, but smaller local authorities do. They face the same issues as the housing bodies, they are too small for large institutional investors to work with, the scale of the housing they undertake and their capacity is too small. That is where our view comes from.