Mr. Barry Quinlan:

I do not have that report in front of me now, but I will get back to the Deputy on it. In terms of that point, we are very sensitive to this, and the last thing we would want to do is increase house prices and not have an impact on supply. That is not the intent. We discussed this in detail when we spoke to representatives of Homes England. They are the people who have delivered this scheme and Homes England has supported home purchase to the tune of more than 200,000 in the UK.

Their sense of it was that when the same unit is compared - a person buying a three-bedroom semi-detached house in Dublin, for example, where the median price at present is around €355,000 - the person buying the same unit supported by the scheme did not see any significant inflation on that unit. That is the feedback we received directly from Homes England when we spoke to its representatives.

However, there are many homes in it and many different things, so it must be safeguarded. We have made this point to home builders in Ireland who have looked for this scheme. Many of them did and said that supply would respond to the realisable demand. We have received many assurances, and some of them would be large plcs and so forth, that they would be willing to show that there was no price inflation if a scheme like this was put in place. That would be very important. As I said earlier, the plan would be that the scheme would be reviewed after perhaps a year of operation just to safeguard that those unintended consequences had not occurred.

What the scheme is designed to do is to boost realisable or actual demand. We are hearing that, given the house prices we have for new homes, particularly in places such as Dublin, people are being approved but perhaps not approved for a sufficient mortgage to be able to buy those homes. That is really the policy intent and we are going to put in every safeguard we can to the detailed design of the scheme, and then we, along with other stakeholders, are going to monitor the scheme's operation very carefully. There was a good and correct exchange across the Government in bringing this proposal forward. Those points have been taken on board and every effort is being made to safeguard against those potential risks.