Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I will comment briefly on Deputy O'Callaghan's amendment. There is a key difference between how some people have been talking about cost rental in the public arena to date and what cost rental actually is. Cost rental is not a discounted market rent. It is not based on purchasing a market price home and setting a rent to repay that. It is based on a mixture of full cost recovery of the cost of delivering the unit, minus the developer's profit, with some relationship to ability to pay. It is crucial that, without necessarily opening up a complex differential rent model, the initial rent setting for all cost rental must have some regard to ability to pay. If you look at those cohorts of people above the threshold for social housing, for whom cost rental will be a key opportunity to have genuinely affordable accommodation, it cannot be above 30%. In fact, for some income cohorts, unless the social housing thresholds are raised, it would need to be between 27% and 29% of net disposable income if we use definitions similar to those advocated by the ESRI etc. These are fundamental amendments. Deputy Boyd Barrett's amendment addresses permanent affordability and Deputy O'Callaghan's addresses affordable rents. They should be at the centre of any initiative that the Government takes on affordable housing, whether the Land Development Agency Bill or the Affordable Housing Bill.