Dr. Robert Kelly:

Others may wish to comment. I can give our perspective and others may be closer to the national development plan. I will explain how we arrive at our housing demand numbers. It is not at county level, it is at national level. We use the CSO population projections which were recently released. We also use a migration assumption. There are different assumptions. We use the higher assumption, called the M1. It includes the natural increase in family formation age in society plus the migration coming in. Part of why there is an imbalance in the housing market is the success of the economy. A lot of people have come to work in Ireland. It has caused huge growth in the employment market but it creates challenges and unexpected population growth in the system. The other huge factor in the numbers we put in is we now have a decade in which we believe there is a gap between demand and supply. One has to ask oneself how quickly or how one wants to plan to reverse that. The way we thought about that is right now we have more people per household than the average in Europe or the UK. We basically estimated Ireland will converge with the UK number in a certain time horizon. We first did it over 25 years, which would get to 52,000. If one wanted to do that in a decade, it brings it up an additional 38,000 on top of that. To get to the European norm, which is lower again, even more housing supply would be needed. All of these factors really matter. It is not just simply the natural birth and death rate that the CSO puts in. One has to take a view on how to address what is in the system as well. I believe they will feed into the national development plan. Dr. Egan may be closer to that matter.