Dr. Kieran McQuinn:

There is a site tax proposal to be brought forward during 2019. It will be quite a period of time before it will actually be in.

We would heartily agree with any way it could be fast-tracked. As I said earlier, there is a case for having higher rates on land that is clearly ready to go and well serviced from an infrastructure point of view to differentiate it from land that is not well serviced. I can think of a scale of rates that would assist in that sense.

I echo the points the Deputy made earlier on affordable housing. The experience of the past five, six or seven years shows that the State has to provide some level of social housing every year. If it does not do that, the problems become huge and will, unfortunately, take a long period to resolve. Obviously, we had the model of the 8% of new developments. However, the problem with that was when 80,000 houses were being built, as was the case in 2005, 2006 and 2007, 8% of that was a sizeable amount. When practically no houses were being built, 8% is next to zero. Clearly, lessons are to be learned in that sense.

As far as the financing bond is concerned, credit is generally a huge issue and will need constant and careful marketing in future. House prices have risen very sharply in recent years and the expectation is that they will continue to do so, particularly in light of the slow supply response. All of that has happened without credit flowing freely because of the impaired nature of the financial services sector. As the banks' balance sheets recover - we are already seeing credit beginning to flow in the economy - we need to avoid the risk of house prices growing purely because credit is expanding. That was obviously the genesis of the difficulty we experienced in the lead-up to 2007, when we had a credit-fuelled bubble.

Credit is quite a tricky issue. The underlying concern I and others have is that the demand for housing has grown very substantially in the past five or six years in the absence of credit. Now, as credit becomes available - and as it will do in years to come - the danger is that price levels and demand-side pressures will be additionally fuelled by that. So-----