Brian Stanley (Laois, Independent)

Could I ask Dr. Kelly a question about supply? It has been mentioned that rent controls or rent pressure zones, RPZs, limit supply. For example, Portlaoise is in one but there does not seem to be limited supply in Portlaoise. A lot of sites are very active in the area and are being built on.

On this relationship between rents and supply, during the Celtic tiger, in one year we built 96,000 houses. Rents shot up significantly. I do not have the figures but the witnesses probably have them somewhere. During that period, we built houses that we did not even need. We were building houses and hoping somebody would move into the country and fill them. That is what was happening. I could show the witnesses the estates it happened in. Rents shot up. We had loads of supply; in fact, we had too much because when the economy crashed we had rows of empty houses. We had too many houses. Why did that happen? Surely that shows the correlation is not necessarily as solid as the witnesses have explained it, and as politicians explain it the whole time. I am not convinced there is a direct correlation between those two things because of the evidence during the Celtic tiger. Would the witnesses not agree that during the Celtic tiger, there was a four- or five-year period where we built a huge amount of houses but rents escalated at an enormous rate?