Ms Tina Donaghy:

It is the million-dollar question and it is one for which we are all trying to find a solution. There are very few moving parts in a construction contract. There is land, build cost and run costs, which include design and consultancy fees, etc. We can control one of those with State land, so land cost is out of it. The other two elements are construction costs and run costs.

We could have cookie-cutter fixed design and have that as what we want built, and that would be replicated in many areas. I do not totally agree with that, and we could have a bit of a mix because we want to build attractive and desirable homes for people to live in. We can pin down the design and land, so really that just leaves construction costs. That is about having a partner. Ms Hegarty spoke about house builders and developers versus builders. Maybe it is time we bring in a number of them and put proposals to tender. We could indicate the set designs and we know what is needed for a three-bedroom semi-detached property or a two-bedroom terrace. We could indicate the size and ensure it meets the standards mentioned by Ms Hegarty; we should build to those and not cut standards. We could ask parties to tender to that on a competitive basis or negotiate on how much it would cost to build such properties on an open-book basis.

Moving parts would reduce and we can also talk about getting funding, including through HBFI. Ms Hegarty has suggested breaking down the number of units so instead of building 100 at a time, they could be broken into smaller tranches. Perhaps they could be done in tranches of 30 so we could pay over stages or builders could be paid as units are released and sold in various tranches. There are obvious ways of doing this.