Mr. Brendan O'Connor:

This is well understood and there are books about this stuff although the units were not necessarily in the kind of areas where everybody wants to live. Many other factors affected house prices at the time other than supply. There was a credit surge. There were loads of different things that are well understood and well written about. There was the way the tax system was structured and how that incentivised certain types of activities. For sure, in the housing market, there was a hell of a lot of credit chasing people and people were purchasing for various reasons.

The rental market was a little different at the time. The rates of growth in the rental market, and I do not have the figures to hand, were nothing like what we saw in the house prices at that time, which might point to the fact that supply was having an impact on rent. Certainly not negative rental growth and I think that would probably have been unusual. The Deputy is quite right that in most markets in the world one tends not to see things fall, and certainly in housing markets. Normally they would increase at least with median income or these types of metrics. There was definitely a different story during the Celtic tiger between the rental market and the housing market. The house price market at the time was completely dysfunctional and would not normally be the one that I would point to as one that would indicate that an increase in supply had an alleviating effect on price.