Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

Yes, but you might end up with a small site with a dozen houses on it and with no room to put another house on it. Where do the assets go? You can do only so much maintenance and upgrading. You could end up with very sizeable assets as a consequence of the State making this investment in the first place for a very good reason. In fact, part of the reason some of these smaller ones came about was that it was an opportunity to deliver on social housing when in fact the local authorities were not delivering the numbers required to be delivered. It was additional.

I think we will need to come back to what protections there are for the State in making sure you end up with some degree of control at the end. What has also piqued my interest is that the State is on the one side, where it has paid for the building of these houses, and then, as the point has been made, you may end up having to fund the rent through the RAS or rent supplement, which is ludicrous, because the State is then paying the rent for a house the State paid for to build in the first place.

I am absolutely depressed after this morning. I cannot conceive of people designing this kind of scheme and not imagining how it would end or where the roadblocks or the problems would be. I think you are right, Chair. We came in here worried and now we are really worried.