Dr. Conor O'Toole:

All of the above. The labour market is a constraint. There is low capacity in the sector to expand in terms of labour availability and there are rising wage costs. That will obviously put downward pressure on production capacity. The capacity of the water network to connect units to that infrastructure is challenged. Irish Water has said it will lead an expansion in its operations to be able to connect more than 35,000 units to the grid over time. That is obviously a constraint. A range of factors is weighing on the outlook.

It is particularly tricky to forecast housing supply at present because of that big jump in commencements we had last year from the development levy waiver. That policy-related increase in commencements has made it much more complicated to work out what the path of those commencements is through to completions.

We are eagerly awaiting the data for the second and third quarters of this year because we should start to see some of those commencements come through, if they follow the typical timeframe. If they do not and they were just policy-related commencements trying to take that waiver, we will not see them come through and we will know it is not a good forecasting benchmark.