Dr. Donal McManus:

I will address a number of Deputy Ó Broin's points. The Irish Council for Social Housing's adviser, PwC, is looking at the three areas, finance, organisation and engagement with other stakeholders. We are putting together an evolving matrix. We are trying to address questions and get solutions. There is an information deficit.

In terms of engagement with Departments, we have not had so much engagement with the Department of Finance, but we have engaged with the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government and with the Minister. We need more engagement.

We need to engage with the Department of Finance on the fiscal space. We need to know what impact it will have on practical issues, for example, if there will be a new consent required to borrow money. If one is part of a local government sub-sector, will the boards of the AHBs be overridden when they want to borrow by the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform? The people on the boards will want to know this in terms of their control.

To respond to Deputy Ó Broin's point on the UK scenario, that was self-inflicted to some degree. It was not driven by EUROSTAT, but by the Office for National Statistics. In a sense, all of the arrangements they had with market rents and so forth were there long before the changes. They were there for many years. The UK situation did not change that much. In a bilateral teleconference last week with the National Housing Federation in England, it said that nothing changed for those two years and, in fact, even borrowing did not change unless a body was going to raise £3 billion or £4 billion. The situation in Britain was fundamentally different because it was not driven by EUROSTAT, but was an internal quasi-political issue which also encompassed the right to buy. The parallel issue is the structure they got back. For the past ten years, the associations in England have been going down the road of social rent, market rent and for sale. It was before this decision. Our sector is still primarily social housing and we try to get into cost rental and affordable rental. We have done some work with PwC on the challenges but we need more engagement with the Department of Finance on things such as practical consent and when it will be effective and so forth.