Eoghan Murphy (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael)
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I had understood that Deputy Casey had given up his speaking time to Deputy Barry. I am glad he got in and asked me some questions about what we are trying to do in Rebuilding Ireland. On the off-balance sheet issue for housing bodies, I met the Irish Council for Social Housing, ICSH, earlier in this term and I met the Housing Alliance, which represents the large tier 3 housing bodies, I think, in October of this year. What we have is a EUROSTAT decision which, as the Deputy knows, is a classification issue for balance sheet purposes. We do not want that to interfere with delivery from the housing bodies, and I have made a commitment that it will not. To date, the classification issue around it, in terms of the accounting treatment, has been led by the Department of Finance. My understanding from the Department of Finance is that even if one was to see such a development - we want to see more private finance coming in through housing bodies for housing delivery - the impact on the fiscal space would be almost negligible, even at the amounts the Deputy is talking about. However, we want to get through this in the way the UK got through this, which was a reclassification of the balance sheet.

I made a commitment to the Housing Alliance during those meetings that we would try to progress some of the proposals it brought to the table in terms of opinions it has around the interpretation the CSO has made, and to see if we can make progress with the CSO. We are trying to hit this on two fronts as a result of those engagements we had in the last couple of months. It will not impact on the delivery by housing bodies in terms of our social housing targets under Rebuilding Ireland.