Mr. Donal McManus:

To reply to Deputy Boyd Barrett, who mentioned crisis and so forth, one could argue there have been crises over the past 20 years of oversupply followed by undersupply, followed by oversupply and so on. However, I believe the point to which he was getting is that social housing is all about market failure. It must be recognised that there is a failure in the market, regardless of whether one calls it a crisis or market failure. I do not know whether the political system is strong enough yet to bring forward the concept of social housing equating to market failure but it must be articulated much more clearly within the political system because it is market failure. Unless one is in Vienna, which has supply as a first choice, one must look at market failure linked to social housing. That must be put on the now in the Dáil in the future. We encourage people to do that.