Mr. Shane Conneely:

It is that different. Ideally, just to maintain the housing stock, we would be building 1% of our housing stock every single year. That is just to stay at a steady state. We expect that housing will last for 100 years for that to be true. We have a growing population in Ireland and we should be doing significantly more than that. Very often, the suburban builds that we have been building over the last 60 years or so are perhaps lasting 80 years before they can credibly be continued. On the commercial side, it is a completely different kind of building. They might last for 30 years or 50 years but it is a different class of building entirely. It is something that can be much more efficient than our housing sector but the big issue is that the State has a role to play as a monopsony, as a buyer of housing, so we are talking about it investing in housing of sufficient quality so that we could build up that skill base and attract in talent. If it could guarantee there would be 30,000 houses built every single year for the next ten years then that would be something that businesses could react to and therefore attractively bring in talent for. As it stands, these things are aspirations. They do not seem to be as concrete as we need our buildings to be.