Mr. Gavin Elliott:

The research done by the Oireachtas Library and Research Service only looked at Bills that made it to the Oireachtas. There is probably an awful lot of legislation that never even got off the page because there were those concerns about private property rights. As a result of the fact that those rights are mentioned in the Constitution and, as Ms Kelly-Desmond said, there is not a counterbalancing right to housing just a vague notion of the common good, that is almost an instruction in a way to the Government to the effect that private property rights are paramount in any consideration of what we do about things such as compulsory purchase, rent freezes or whatever. Those Bills were never engaged with on their merits. We are not saying that all of them included things that Home for Good would support or anything like it, but it is to point out they were rejected on the basis of being unconstitutional in the first place.