Dr. Kieran McQuinn:

We had a seminar this morning about the issue of housing, particularly on the projected increasingly lower home ownership rates in the Irish economy in future and the impact this will have on poverty rates among older people. To put this in a broader context, a point that came up is the major issue of housing affordability, which is not just an Irish phenomenon. It is an international issue that has arisen over the years mainly because we have seen very strong demand-side pressures in the housing market, low interest rates and relatively strong income growth. That has driven house prices and accommodation costs generally, including rents. We are now in this situation where we have seen, over time, this real, sharp increase in housing costs across countries that is probably particularly pronounced in the Irish case. It throws up many difficult questions about how people will get on the property ladder and how we will deal with housing costs more generally. There have been interesting contributions in the UK on this from a well-known contributor, Mr. Ian Mulheirn, a director at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, who has talked about this issue etc.

To return to the issue of how to increase rental supply, which I think is where the Deputy is going, there is no doubt there has been an increase in the number of small-time landlords who have left the market over the past number of years. That has caused many problems, particularly around homelessness, where many of the tenants of these landlords were typically those in marginal circumstances. The exodus of these small-time landlords has contributed significantly to the homelessness problem. On the broader perspective of how we increase rental supply, the Deputy is angling towards, or talking about, the use of taxation policy as a way of stimulating the number of landlords we have. If we go back, we are possibly scarred somewhat by the financial crisis in that respect. The use of taxation policy as a way of stimulating activity in the housing market generally is something we have tended to shy away from in the past ten or 15 years because it played a very negative role overall in contributing to the excesses of the Celtic tiger and the difficulties in the housing market. People are naturally reluctant to go down that path but that is not to say that, in some ways, one should look at taxation policy as a way of stimulating supply. It is clear, given the kind of shortages, rental inflation and house price increases we are looking at, all measures to stimulate supply should be looked at, analysed and discussed. As I said, using taxation policy has always had a negative connotation over the past period because of the difficulties we experienced during the Celtic tiger.

I do not know if Dr. O'Toole has anything to add on that.