Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 22 March 2023
Committee on Budgetary Oversight
Stability Programme Update: Discussion
Dr. Robert Kelly:
I will add one point. I completely agree with everything Mr. Madouros said. The real issue here is the imbalance between housing supply and housing demand. Looking at the current public expenditure on housing, Ireland is among the top across the EU comparators. It is not necessarily about spending more money; it is about the integrated solution of all elements to create that supply. Right now, we do not spend fully the capital budget put towards housing. There are issues, potentially, in terms of the supply and rising costs, but it is integrating everything from planning to costs to scale to productivity to technological advancements. It will have to be a suite of measures to try to close that gap between what is needed, and it is not just what is needed this year or last year. It is a cumulation of multiple years now where we simply have not supplied enough housing relative to demand.
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