Mr. Mark FitzGerald:

If I could come in on a few of those points, we represent an industry and Property Industry Ireland came about in response to the crisis. If a person is part of an industry, he or she has to go through the red door, as it were, and say he or she has something to declare. That is self-apparent. Where we are trying very much to come from is in the public good. The context of the way we are approaching this problem is that we are looking backwards, and we only look backwards to learn what we should do in the future. In the 1971 census, I think, there were 700,000 houses in Ireland and, according to Dr. Duffy's figures, we have about 1.7 million occupied houses in Ireland and, again by Dr. Duffy's figures, we will go to 2.8 million by 2051. In the next 25 to 30 years, we need to see as much change in housing in Ireland as we have in the past 50 years. That is the context of the proposed initiatives we are suggesting.

Philosophically, looking at the public good, at the moment we have a policy of controlled containment. What we probably need is a policy of controlled enablement. On the zoned land issue and why more land should be zoned, there is fairly good international research from a New Zealand body, which I can share with the committee, that studied many global cities and shows that zoning more land actually does work. It is an 80 page document that is worth reading because we would hope it answers some of the questions the committee is talking about.

Looking back even five years, at the end of 2012, Property Industry Ireland was asked by the Secretary General of the Government to attend a meeting with representatives of NAMA and local authorities about the housing crisis that was emerging. It was not perceived to be the crisis that it is now, but it was emerging. At the time, the Minister of State had made a speech saying we had enough land zoned to build. In advance of that meeting, we went around Dublin and looked at every scheme that we thought could be built the following year, comparing the theory with the reality. We turned up at the meeting and showed the difference between the theory and reality of what was going to be built. Unfortunately, what we predicted came to pass. At the time, part of the initial figures was that 2,000 houses could be built in 2012 and 2013 in Adamstown. It was not physically possible to build 2,000 houses in 2013 in Adamstown and, even if a person did, he or she would not be able to sell them. That is the difference between theory and realty. One has to look.

We are interested in bringing the price of land down because we think it will bring the price of housing down. If a profit is going to be made in the private sector, it is probably more in the public good that the profit is made on the building of the house rather than on the land. We probably all agree on that.

In terms of owning a target, we live in a world where people have to take responsibility and those who do need to be held to account, while the people who do the holding to account need to behave responsibly. I really do not mind who owns the target, but my point is that somebody should own the target. The reason I mentioned the national planning regulator was in light of the National Roads Authority, NRA - it is called a different name now – which was quite successful in owning and delivering something. Somebody has to own it.