Neasa Hourigan (Dublin Central, Green Party)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

We are already at the stage where people are seeing astronomical rents and starting to call them affordable. It is appalling, certainly in my constituency. I thank the witnesses for today's session. We are at the beginning of our work on this and I wonder whether some of our questions are very open-ended in nature. I hope they will bear with us. We are trying to get to grips with this topic and we hope to do some quite detailed work on it.

With that in mind, one of the things I wanted to ask about today was how a system of indexation would deal with this. It has been referenced a little in both submissions. How would the witnesses deal with the operation of indexation where there are sharp increases or decreases in whatever it is benchmarked to? In this case, we are all talking about wages. Dr. McDonnell talked about a backward-focused set of data that might relate to four quarters. Does he believe that would be sufficient to deal with increases or decreases? What is the danger there? Does he think we will be able to create a system of indexation that is robust enough to guard against those very sharp increases or decreases and ensure that indexation is doing what we want it to do?