Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

What we are seeing now is a progressive increase in the price of houses based on the costs associated with land acquisition, competition, market forces and so forth. The price is going up all the time. One of the things we should have learned from previous experience is that there is no provision whereby the price of housing property can go up all the time and survive. It cannot survive at that. Something has to give in order to ensure those who have invested in homes are protected. I am not suggesting for a moment that we meet housing needs by way of public or private landlords. Members of the public, particularly those with reasonably good incomes, should be able to purchase a house in their own right unrestricted. They were always able to do that in the past. The reason they were able to do that in the past was that they had a couple of options. They could have gone to the local authority, which is a housing body and not a bank, as some people nowadays refer to them. They could get a loan there on certain conditions provided they were in a certain income bracket. It worked very well. In some cases, there were more than the 25-year or 20-year loans and so on, but it worked extremely well. We are missing that.

I am dealing with a customer today who has a very good income that is not to be sniffed at but does not qualify for anything from the county council. This person cannot and will not get a loan from the bank because of the effects of the crash and a previous mortgage issue. We cannot condemn people who were thrashed in the crash either.

We cannot condemn them for saying that if they waited for another five years, their credit would be cleared and so on and so forth. The fact of the matter is they need that now. Waiting for five years, until the credit facilities have been satisfied, is not going to solve the problem. It may solve the problem for the lending institutions but not for the population of the country.

If there is large-scale offloading by investment companies, the question that comes to my mind is this: how many of those companies are funding the construction of particular housing developments? That leads to the next question: are they involved in funding the development in general? Are they funding the builder or developer to build the house, or whatever the case may be? Then they are coming back afterwards and laying down the regulations whereby an applicant for one of these houses, be they affordable or otherwise, is going to increase the rates. I have to say I am amazed at the kind of prices that are being considered at the moment. I have to ask serious questions about the wisdom of enabling that to continue indefinitely. I have a last question, if somebody might comment on that.