Mr. Michael Layde:

REITS are new to Ireland and facilitated by a Government decision on tax treatment. I am familiar with the Canadian example. We had discussions recently with the approved housing bodies and other stakeholders to begin to explore this to see what is possible. It is bound up with a return on investment. That is at the heart of many of the issues we face in attracting external funding. Any investment will be remunerated out of public funds, whether through payment and availability agreements or whatever, but there are broader issues about the tax treatment about housing units being provided for social purposes or where a proportion of the development is so provided.

The Canadian model is interesting because it applies to a proportion of units. We would be concerned about a situation in which the REIT model was used to develop large-scale social housing projects of the type we pursued out of public funds in the past, which presented difficulties. We are aware of it and we are exploring the possibility that there is some advantage for the delivery of social housing.