Dr. Kieran McQuinn:

We have talked a lot about this because we do a lot of work on housing. The key issue for us is the cost of supplying a house in the economy. That is the underlying issue. A lot of work was done in the aftermath of the financial crisis to compare price levels across jurisdictions. It is always a very fraught exercise to make sure one is comparing apples with apples rather than apples with oranges. Some detailed work has been done by the European Commission in the last couple of years which has sought to adjust for the different peculiarities of individual markets across the euro area in comparing house prices. The kind of estimates it has produced are as robust as anyone is going to get in a cross-country setting. It shows clearly that even adjusting for size, Irish house prices are among the highest in Europe. That is fairly incontrovertible. If the fundamental premise is that it is not profitable for developers to supply a house in the Irish market now, we have to ask why that is the case. What is the underlying problem here? I do not think there is much more scope for measures which may bid-up house prices, which is sometimes couched as "providing confidence to the market", if we look at it in the context of where Irish house prices are relative to other jurisdictions. Then it returns to supply and the cost of supplying a house and what the difficulty with that is. One of the big problems is data. We have seen people coming out with estimates of what it costs to build an apartment in Dublin.

The following day there is a letter in The Irish Timesexplaining why it is wrong, inaccurate and incorrect, etc. We actually have a difficulty with establishing the cost. One of the issues we have often raised - it is an issue other people have raised as well - is the whole issue of land costs. Why are land costs so high in the Irish market? It comes back inevitably to the issue of speculation. There is an issue about people hoarding land banks and consequently keeping the price of land banks and land generally at an artificially high level when compared to other jurisdictions. Those are some of the areas I would pretty vigorously tap. I know the Government has brought in measures to address some of those points. I believe that is where we can get a bang for our buck in addressing the underlying issues.

We welcomed other aspects of the Bill. In general, the origination of the LDA is good in terms of its ability to co-ordinate a supply response across public lands as long as there is a significant commitment to social and affordable housing as part of it. Several measures there are positive. As I said, the fundamental issue is the cost of supplying a house and the measures we can bring in to aggressively tackle that.