Dr. Seán Healy:

We would be much happier to see the money being spent on the HAP scheme being invested. We have argued this endlessly. We consider HAP to be almost out of control at this stage. We are spending extraordinary levels of money that are not producing the kinds of housing we need. We are still stuck with the housing problem at the end of the day.

We would be much happier to start moving in the direction of having that invested in social and affordable housing. We would argue that the cost rental proposal, which I just talked about, would help the situation along the way.

On the spare money issue and the question of whether to spend it or bank it, we make a provision in our budget costings for the rainy day fund. We believe a certain amount should be set aside. However, we also believe the country should not repeat the mistakes we made before. Ten years ago, when we had an extraordinary crash we took a very tough austerity route to deal with it, as did much of the rest of the world. There is agreement among most international economists of note today that it was the wrong way to go. The critical issue that we should recognise is that we have serious deficits and they need to be addressed. We get opportunities to do that. There are two types of opportunity, the first of which is the type that arises after a crash when, for example, a large number of people who were involved in construction are unemployed. It would have been easy to employ many of these people to address the gap we had in social and affordable housing. Today, we have an opportunity to do something with windfall money. Dr. McDonnell from the Nevin Economic Research Institute pointed out that the investment levels in Ireland are low by international standards. In fact, they have been extraordinarily low. If one takes the previous decade, State investment levels are very low.