Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I can help with that conundrum. Most of the construction workers that could be building houses are working as taxi drivers because the pay in construction is too low. If pay and security of employment in construction were better they would move out of taxi driving into construction. Also, there would be no requirement for new houses because they are already living here. When talking about housing output should we make a distinction between types of housing output? To me, overheating could arise if we return to private sector output of the scale we witnessed pre-2008. A dramatic increase in public sector housing output would be different, for two reasons. The houses that are being built are being sold at prices that nobody can afford. The banks, rightly, are not willing to lend to people amounts of money which their income cannot sustain, as they did in the past, leading to the market crashing. It was at the point everybody realised the emperor had no clothes. If the investment is in social and affordable housing this problem does not arise because it is creating a revenue stream for the Government. One would not be financing housing in an unsustainable way. In terms of current social and affordable housing provision a huge amount of the expenditure is current expenditure, which is an accident waiting to happen. If the State has its own stock, it is not an accident waiting to happen: it is a revenue stream. Should we not distinguish between sustainable housing output, which is public, and non-sustainable housing output, which is being produced at market prices that are unaffordable?