Dr. Conor O'Toole:

I thank the Senator for his questions, to which I will try to give a couple of responses. On the first point, I agree that these types of credit market interventions can be very positive. Where one succeeds in providing credit market interventions to those households which otherwise would have been unable to make that transaction, that is a very positive thing. Where there are critical gaps in the market that can be identified as gaps which these instruments can help to address, it is important to be able to facilitate that. For example, in our review of the Rebuilding Ireland home loan scheme we clearly stated that there was a clear gap in the market that that particular intervention was able to address and that there was a lot of merit in that particular instrument in doing that. I completely agree that the ability to use these interventions to intervene in the market is an important policy lever to have. As I mentioned earlier, in terms of the focus of our submission, we were trying to provide some insight to the committee that was useful by drawing on the research that we had done. The research that we had done crossed over on the two elements of the Bill that I mentioned in the opening statement, first, the general credit market interventions and, second, the cost rental model.