Dr. Conor O'Toole:

As Deputy O'Donnell mentioned, I am not going to state whether home ownership or renting is preferable, nor am I going to mention anything about an optimal tenure. I do not think that is possible to estimate. These are long-term structural changes that happen in economies. Internationally, we can see the rate of home ownership is coming down in some of the markets that traditionally had high home ownership. A broad change appears to be happening globally in some housing markets.

The research was trying to do two things, and the most important takeaway from our point of view concerns them. First, the timeframe over which we were assessing the piece of research is very long, in particular for those younger age cohorts. Therefore, there is much greater uncertainty around any of the point estimates the Deputy mentions for those particular cohorts. Therefore, there is time for policy measures, many of which I mentioned earlier, to have an impact on where the overall home ownership rate lands in the longer term. The two points are, first, that there is time for those policy measures to have an impact, like we mentioned today. Second, if we are to have a different tenure structure in the future, as we had today, we then need to factor that into our pensions provision and thinking about our pension system and how that may need to be altered or recalibrated in the future to take into consideration the degree of renters who will have a housing payment when they face that cliff of their income.