Mr. Dara Turnbull:

We have written extensively about international solutions. The Deputy mentioned one already, the Livret A scheme, which originally existed in France not to fund housing but to fund war. It has since been adapted, thankfully, to more socially useful purposes. It has existed for over 100 years in France. It recycles the excess savings of ordinary households and reuses them for the purpose of funding socially productive infrastructure such as schools, hospitals and public transport, but the biggest beneficiaries are social and affordable forms of housing. What they do is offer an attractive rate of interest to savers, over and above what they get from a typical current account offer by a commercial bank in France, and those funds are then channelled at affordable, low rates of interest to social housing providers.

I could speak extensively about the other policies out there. If we are talking specifically about affordable and social housing, which is the topic here, it is the hot topic we hear about a lot around Europe. People see this growing divide between people who access social housing in different countries and the people who access market housing. There are people caught in the middle, and that is the new space opening up in Ireland and across the European Union. There are people looking for that kind of affordable tranche of housing.

I will direct the committee to a couple of schemes. I will not comment on Ireland's own experience with affordable housing and things like cost rental. I will leave that to Professor Norris and the representatives from the ICSH. Internationally, I recommend looking at Hitas housing, a form of affordable ownership housing that exists in Finland, specifically in Helsinki. I think it was mentioned in the previous session. It is a form of cost-purchase housing where you buy the bricks and mortar but you do not buy the land. The land is retained in public ownership in perpetuity and you pay a small land rent on that housing, but you become the owner of the home. You can sell it if you choose to move out, but the price you can sell it at is guaranteed to be affordable over the longer term because the price is basically whatever cost you paid originally, plus some-----