Dr. Seán Healy:

We do not think so. There is an issue about the cost of housing, about which there are many arguments. We are not convinced that putting something in place that will give the developer extra money will generate extra supply. It seems to us that in that analysis there is a failure to understand the 89,000 households on housing waiting lists will never buy a house. Their incomes are so far removed from anything remotely close to what is required to get a mortgage to buy a house that they are not at the races. We will still be left with 89,000 households on housing waiting lists and until such time as the Government puts a social housing programme in place to deal with them, we will be left with the problem.

Part of the issue is that there seems to be a certain slowness on the part of local authorities to start building. From talking to people in local authorities, it seems that there is concern that central government is not really serious about building social housing. There is a belief that it is really trying to get the housing market going again, that it will eventually create one almighty approved housing body that will be given the funding required to provide 100,000 social housing units over a period of time and that responsibility will be taken away from the local authorities. That is the concern of some of the local authority officials with whom I have had discussions. My basic position is that money could be made available at very lost, using off-the-books methodology which would require a rental cost approach and removing the ceiling in the differential rent system. It is clear that there is the capacity to have an off-the-books mechanism to provide the funding needed to build units to eliminate the social housing problem. Supply and demand would start to come into balance and it would then be very interesting to see what would happen with prices because they are being driven by demand.