Dr. Ronan Lyons:

It may not be the best place to answer this but off the top of my head, I know that the Housing Commission report supported by the majority - if that is what we are calling it - had in one of its appendices examples of statements where Members of the Oireachtas were under the impression they could not do X, Y or Z because of the nature of the Constitution and the protection of property rights. In that sense, it was kind of defeated before it even started. People were not even going to get into it because they thought that. As Dr. Casey has outlined in his remarks, there is no issue there. Our report went a different way and the advice we had was different but I respect his view that the proposal, as he reads it, creates something new. It is not just that we needed to fix this to clarify it for the people, and that there was something wrong in the Constitution. There is no serious legal expertise that believes there is something wrong in the Constitution. It is just something that seems to get mentioned a lot. That is my perception not as a legal expert but as someone who, at least this time last year, was very heavily invested for a few months in trying to understand this and to make a helpful contribution.