Professor Karl Whelan:

I want to say a word about house prices. They contribute to inflation because expensive housing leads to people having to look for higher wages to be able to afford where they live. That affects costs throughout the economy in many ways. Regarding Government intervention, we clearly have a housing market that is dysfunctional in many ways and many different things could be done. Regarding supply capacity, I note today's Daft.ie report on the number of rental properties available across the country. It is extremely low. There are very few places for people to rent. I see this as an academic. Our students struggle to find places to rent. Colleagues coming from other countries to work with us struggle to find places to live. Availability is not a heap of laughs for people looking to buy their own properties either. We need to start by noting that there is clearly a scarcity of housing in the country relative to what we need. We have not repealed the law of economics which states that when something is scarce, it will be more expensive. One reason that rents are so high is because it is so difficult to get rental properties as a result of their being so scarce. The same applies to house purchase costs. There is a talking point that, although we built many houses in the 2000s and somehow the prices went up, that is somehow irrelevant and the scarcity that we see has nothing to do with the high prices. I strongly disagree with that. It would be great if we had more supply, with much affordable public housing. The only issue that I have with that is that it is expensive.

One should look at the Government's capacity within the dreaded EU fiscal rules. I suspect that in the past, the Deputy might have heard me complaining about the fiscal rules, but they exist. The ESRI gives a figure of 33,000 housing units being needed a year. That is probably an underestimate. The reality is that we will need the private sector to produce units as well as public housing being built. It is not a case of and-or, but rather, as with the girl from the meme emoji, "Why not both?" That is what we need to do.