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

I was listening to the committee's proceedings earlier on the monitor. I was not being rude in not being present. I am trying to double job.

I appreciate the enormous contribution AHBs make to providing social and affordable housing. I do not doubt their motives and the good work they have done. However, I am worried about their campaign. I understand they are in a dilemma that is not of their making. They are responding pragmatically to a dilemma created for them, essentially by the fiscal rules. The reclassification we need is in how social and affordable housing is treated by the fiscal rules. We would be far better advised campaigning on that than campaigning for it to come off balance sheet. I am deeply concerned about that. I know why they are doing it and I do not doubt their good motives, but fundamentally I think they are making a mistake.

As the witnesses have put very starkly, the chickens are coming home to roost on the folly of the fiscal rules, which now essentially prevent states building public and affordable housing using their own money and their own resources. It is shocking that if Brexit hits us hard or some economic downturn hits us, the State could be prohibited from building public and affordable housing. We need to say loud and clear that it is outrageous and unacceptable. Because we are in that space, the housing bodies are being put under pressure to find other forms of financing and essentially fragment the social and affordable housing system, which fundamentally has to be about subsidised housing and has nothing to do with the market. Surely that is what public and affordable housing is about.

I would like to hear our guests' views on that. We discussed with the NDFA the dilemma that Clúid, I think, has in Enniskerry.