Ms Orla Hegarty:

I do not understand the rationale for having a different standard for rental and social tenants than there is for purchasers. That was a misstep. If we want people to live in apartments for the long term, all of them need to be liveable, with a decent space size, decent safety standards and decent levels of amenities. All of those were deregulated. In architecture, we do not always make the distinction between houses and apartments. We talk about density and the number of people or units per hectare. We start with that and then we see what form of building that might take. We then get a mixture of apartments and houses that reaches that density. As I said, that can be done between three and six floors so that a sustainable density site may have houses and apartments on it. We certainly have plenty of inner suburban and suburban sites that would be suitable for that. If we think of the amount of surface car parking in some places and underutilised land, there are certainly opportunities for that scale of development on much of that space.

What we have seen, however, is a lot of permission in the cities for very dense developments that are probably not attractive to purchasers. It is difficult to see that purchasers would pay €450,000 or more for a two-bedroom apartment in one of these blocks without many amenities when they can get a very good house in suburban Dublin for less. If we want mixed communities in the city, we have to make these developments attractive to purchasers as well as renters.