Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party)
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I will not even comment on that. I remember that, and I remember the feeling and the sense of desperation as to what we had to do. For that reason, I support the rainy day fund. It makes sense, whatever the scale. The bigger the better, in some ways. I listened with interest to what Deputy Lawless said. It was said that because of the potential overheating of the economy, particularly as we ramp up housing, which we have to do, we need to look at other sectors or investment areas that we might scale back to avoid overheating. I do not know how deeply the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council goes into specific projects, but I can suggest one project that might be a perfect candidate for such a contraction. I refer to the motorway programme, where at the moment we are spending massively on upgrading the N11, the N2, the N3 and the N7, all on the approach to Dublin. This will add to our traffic problems. There will be more cars coming into a city where we are taking people's front gardens away because there are so many cars coming in. This would be a double win. It might help us to get some workers off these mad projects widening motorways into Dublin and deploy them to house-building in the centre of the city. It would be a win-win-win situation. They would not have to drive from the far reaches of the N2, N3, N7, N11 and so on. I do not know if the witnesses have any comment on that. It would be a perfect counterbalancing, defeating the construction sector to allow us to build housing.

On that same issue, I was very taken with what a witness said about the interesting statistic that for every 10,000 units there is gross domestic product, GDP, growth of roughly 1%. Again, we are discussing the details of economic strategy. It seems to me that one of the key initiatives we are examining at the moment is the use of the cost-rental model for housing construction and public housing ownership. It has a fantastic advantage in my mind in that I believe it could be done off-balance sheet, as it is done in other European countries. It is the perfect counter-cyclical tool, because it is very much long-term investment, particularly over time, as an asset base is built up. It creates a revenue stream and public housing construction which is not dependent on the Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment of the day handing out a big wad of cash, which is the worst form of matching long-term investment requirements with long-term financing.

It makes sense to borrow for housing. Cost-rental is the perfect public borrowing, and indeed housing association and local authority mechanism. We are doing none of it. I think we have got 50 houses in Enniskerry, but nothing compared to where we should be. I do not know if the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council is concerned with these matters. We should change the nature of the housing scheme so that we avoid this boom-bust housing model. When the Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment does not have the cash he cannot build it and therefore there is an accentuation of the cyclical nature of the Irish economy, where housing contracts rapidly in bad times and then expands massively in boom times. Cost-rental irons that out. Do the witnesses think that would be a good economic response? I will leave it at that.