Dr. Donal McManus:

A few brief issues were raised there about the European context. Our social housing sector is half the size of the European average, which is about 17% and we are at less than 8% or 9%. It was mentioned that the waiting lists could be opened up and a wider number of people could access public social housing. That is one access. What has happened in Ireland is people tend to go for schemes, like affordable schemes or cost rental schemes, which are trying to create mixed tenure. They are the two options can be looked at: opening up the eligibility for waiting lists to higher income people, or new tenders. It is not that complicated. In our sector, we would be keen to house more people from medium and higher income households to give mixed tenures.

Deputy Ó Broin made comments about our capacity to meet the targets by 2021. They are substantial, even though they are only a third of the overall targets. We have land pressures. We are talking to local authorities because we do not have a huge supply of land.

We believed that the land initiative could bring forward a supply of land, even the minimal requirement for social and affordable housing. Everything is hodgepodge in terms of land assembly. There is a bit here and a bit there. It would be useful if there was one body that could co-ordinate land assembly for both local authorities and for our sector as well. On finance, we have a couple of sources we did not have a couple of years ago. The Housing Finance Agency is the dominant player for social housing and finance. We also have other growing players in the market. A lot of this is about learning. As Mr. O'Connor has said, ethical investors are looking at our sector and are just looking for a return, not any complicated agendas about ownership, and so forth. We have to reach out to that. It is not any wider agenda. If we can widen the spread of finance options by one or two that would be helpful to our supply. Our pipeline at the moment is quite good for the next year or so. After that, if there is no land, it will tail off. We have relied a lot on turnkeys and on joint ventures. That will continue, but both local authorities and our sector have an issue with land assembly and this debate is only happening in the last year or two, not three or four years.

On the private sector side, we are relying on nearly 5,000 homes coming through the private rental sector, the landlord sector. We do not know what all their motivations are. The one thing we like about social housing for local authorities in the housing associations is that the supply can be controlled because one has the non-profit motivation. In the private landlord sector one cannot control that supply. That is why we need to reverse here and get to that point of 17% or 18% of social housing as an objective. Everything will fall from that. In the next couple of years we are going to be pressurised with land supply and delivery. We have a reasonable pipeline at the moment. We can see last year as one single year; I will ask Dr. Hearne to come in here.