Mr. Martin Whelan:

There are a lot of figures. When you piece them together, they are quite similar, but they can appear quite different. The Central Bank and the ESRI when they were in front of this committee talked about a medium- to long-run equilibrium demand of between approximately 53,000 and 54,000 new homes per annum. That included accounting for increased and pent-up demand over a 25-year period. The same witnesses suggested that in order to address that pent-up demand in a shorter period of time, perhaps over a decade, you would need between 25,000 and 35,000 additional new homes each year over that shortened period. There is clarity, very much so, on the numbers.