Dr. Seán Healy:

I will take up two points, one of which I want to agree with and the other of which I want to disagree with. Let me put the point of disagreement first. We discussed this 25 years ago in 1997 and it was in the context of a new national agreement that was being negotiated and the community and voluntary pillar were in the negotiations for the first time. We were surprised because when one puts in all the pillars that were part of that negotiation, we were the only one to argue for increasing the supply of social housing. It was in that context that I was having this discussion with Deputy Durkan, who agreed with me but we did not have too many other people agreeing with us.

I want to clarify the other matter. I was not saying the income distribution situation in 2007 was good. I was just making the point that in 2007 the social welfare payments were indexed. That was the issue I was referring to. There was a whole lot of other stuff going on that we did not agree with at the time. All one has to do is look at our response to and analysis of the budget that year to see why we welcomed the indexation, benchmarking and so on. We disagreed with a lot of things.

I refer to the other point the Deputy is raising. We need both an indexation and a benchmarking of welfare payments and a dramatic increase in the housing supply. On the one side we have an incredible requirement at this moment because of waiting lists, HAP and all sorts of other stuff. The Deputy and Ms Murphy have already discussed our recent study on the implications of what is happening in housing for poverty and so on. One thing that is clear is we need dramatic interventions, not just in the next two years but over the whole decade because the scale of what is required is massive. What worries me in that context is that we are talking about a huge increase in the number of jobs and a lot of those will bring people in from abroad, which puts further pressure on the housing system. It is critically important that we get ahead of this loop. We need to benchmark and index welfare payments at the same time. We need to do it simultaneously rather than get trying to get housing done before coming back to welfare and other issues. Increasing the housing supply is the most important thing we need to do as a country, both economically and socially. We need it from both sides of that equation.