Dr. Peter Stafford:

Therefore, when we are making our estimates for the number of houses that will be completed in 2014, at best we only have official data from February, and it is now September.

The second factor is that tomorrow, the Central Statistics Office will release house price data for August, but as Ms Finnegan mentioned, with half the transactions taking place in the cash market, these are not included in the CSO data. Again, at best we have a snapshot of what is happening in a market which is moving very quickly. The CSO is doing good work in trying to improve the basis of its statistics and this will help. If we can consolidate all of the data, this will help us identify where any supply and demand mismatches are emerging. Once we identify these, we can resolve them. Currently, we are sometimes trying to resolve these in an information vacuum. Construction 2020 creates important forums to help us do this, which is vital.