Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank Ms Deering for her statement and the Comptroller and Auditor General for his reports. I do not want to paraphrase what Ms Deering said, but I will focus on one line where she said the HBFI identified gaps in the existing fund available to creditors and did so in an efficient and rigorous way. I am thinking back to the development of the HBFI. In many ways, many of the new policy tools that have come in, such as Housing for All and so on, have increased the number of policy tools available to tackle the housing market. While all homes built are very important and help to solve the housing crisis - as Vice Chairman of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Housing, Local Government and Heritage I am very conscious of that - the role of members of the Committee of Public Accounts is to hold the HBFI to account for the policy area under its remit.

I will focus on the idea of small and medium-sized builders and the access they have to credit. Would the representatives say that was the core origin of the creation of the HBFI? It certainly seems to have comprised much of the early work of the organisation.