Mr. Tom Parlon:

Well, if we take now, the current price of a house to a first-time buyer, 40% of that house we would estimate, and has been sort of agreed by other commentators, goes directly to the Exchequer when you take in the VAT, the stamp duty ... like, it's important to realise ... and we've been making this point, you know, to Government, you know, all along, and we have always been for reduced stamp duty, and I know at one stage when Minister Cowen came in as Minister, he reduced stamp duty, he took off the liability for stamp duty for the first €125,000. It meant that somebody instead of paying, I think, about €25,000 for a house, paid about €15,000. And ... like, that's a cost ... like, whether it be stamp duty or VAT or local development contributions or whatever, it's ultimately the first-time buyer that ends up paying them. There was a sort of a notion previously that if you lumped all these costs up on the developer, you'd sort of ... he was going to pay, but ultimately it's the first-time buyer or the buyer of a house that pays. And currently VAT at ... is it 13% or 13.5%, you know, that when the ... if ... if I have a house built and ready to sell, the VAT is only payable as soon as I sign the contract to sell the house, and then 13.5% of a €300,000 house is quite a substantial amount of money that goes straight to the Exchequer. And there were times when we had our difficulties and nobody was buying houses and there was an overlap, that we were imploring the Government to incentivise the buying of those houses to release the VAT as an Exchequer sort of a benefit to them, so as it would give an opportunity for the industry to get started again. But there's no question about it, the Government ... the construction of houses in particular and ... over the years has been a major cash cow for different Governments.