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

I appreciate that this is with the benefit of hindsight and so on, but it is part of the reason we are now are we are. It is disappointing that when we had so much control, more emphasis on a policy level was not placed on turning that around.

I will make one last point, which is that both the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage and the Construction Industry Federation, CIF, have both said that within the core city of Dublin the cost of construction will likely always exceed a possible affordable sale value. Therefore, every house that will be built in the core of the city will require some Government scheme or it will be required that there will be some form of public housing. My point is that there were many sites that NAMA owned within that. Had that conclusion been reached earlier, we could have had actually delivered more public housing over the ten-year period in which NAMA had control over the portfolio.