Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Okay. I have two other points. On housing, rents are now significantly higher than the mortgage costs on a property. A generation of younger people who we would like to be able to commit to stay in Ireland are being driven out by the lack of affordable housing. In the centre of Dublin, on the northside, it is common to find landlords seeking considerably more than €2,000 for a modest two bedroom apartment. There are people who want to rent for a significant period while they build up to buying a house. However, there is a real market failure which I do not see that reflected in the statement here. It makes a nonsense of the rainy day fund that the council is sitting on two failures of Government accounting in housing and health. I wish it was possible to seriously address this and that we would get some rebalancing of the quality of Government accounting as the Government seems to have lost the plot in both.