Dr. Kieran McQuinn:

I have not looked at it in detail. I have seen and followed some of the commentary around it. That was one of the points I made to Deputy Canney. It did strike me that the Land Development Agency would be in a strong position to negotiate at a much larger level in terms of dealing with prospective developers rather than individual local authorities in that there were efficiencies that could be gained in this respect and that may enable development in areas where there may not otherwise have been. The Deputy is right. The whole definition of social housing and what constitutes a social house or what is affordable constitute a key part of the equation.

In respect of any definitions that are used, especially the granularity work that is used, we have done a considerable amount of work in that regard, as the Deputy is aware since we probably discussed it with him in previous sessions. This is fairly detailed work looking at what Irish households pay on average. The results are very stark in terms of the significant cohorts of our households that are paying relatively large shares of their income on housing. This is a feature not just of the past two, three or four years. It has been a feature of the Irish property market going back as far as we have looked at it. It would be ideal if any definition of social housing and how social housing is couched would be with reference to that kind of analysis in terms of what people are paying, what they can afford to pay and possibly what people pay in other jurisdictions. We benchmarked Irish affordability against other jurisdictions using norms that are used in terms of whether it is 30% or the 30-40 rule used in other countries. It would be useful for the definition of social or affordable housing to be couched in that type of work and that kind of granularity of analysis.