Mr. Michael Cleary:

The general thrust of our advice is that land is always the most expensive intangible in the rate per square foot because it is the part that is not tendered for. It is usually procured if it is not publicly owned, if it privately owned, and usually bid for. The capacity to bid and win land skews everything else. One can quite readily measure the construction cost element. Any good quantity surveyor, whether it be a social apartment, in respect of which there is full transparency on the cost of construction, or a private apartment, can quickly tell what the cost of the lift, the lights and every other element will be.

There are a number of reasons it is expensive in Ireland. Some relate to the technical issues, to which Ms Myler alluded, such as basement car parking spaces and so on.

I refer to the number of apartments that must be put off a core. The placing of more apartments off a core, in other words, off a lift shaft or stairwell, is helpful. I refer also to the number of single or dual aspect apartments. In other countries, for example, the ones to which the Senator referred, there are single aspect apartments, which means that one can fit more apartments around the core with a singular aspect. Does this make it a better or worse apartment? That is for someone else to decide, but it is a way to reduce costs.

The third part is the cost of finance, which goes back to the Viennese housing model, to which we referred. The Dutch also have such a model. It is a matter of being able to de-risk the process, which is the point we have been emphasising all along, and provide land with planning permission, with what we said the Land Development Agency could do. You are telling someone, "I need you to produce and deliver X number of housing or apartment units." The finance costs would then be really cheap because the risk level would have dropped all the way as one would have removed the infrastructure and planning risks and de-risked the process.

Going back to a point raised I think by Senator Grace O'Sullivan, in 1993, on my second day in the job, I was with a developer who received a list of quantities and threw it across the room, saying, "I cannot believe apartments are that expensive to build in Ireland." I was not a grey-haired quantity surveyor at the time, but I said the reason that was the way it was was that one of the issues was that Ireland was an island and, unfortunately, the transfer of labour and the procurement of all of these goods - the other part of this - had to take place from somewhere else. Working in Holland or elsewhere on mainland Europe was incredible in that regard. During the downturn we did a lot of work in London and Germany and it was incredible how they sourced their equipment and inputs from various places. They were able to move them across overnight. It takes an age to get them to Ireland. Therefore, there are a variety of factors at play.