Mr. Vasileios Madouros:

Because some of it could be cross-border. It could be investment funds that are in other parts of Europe and some of it might be another type of vehicle that invests in these properties.

To be absolutely clear, the vast majority of assets of investment funds we supervise and regulate are in the commercial property market rather than the residential property market to which I think the Deputy was referring. Therefore, of the total assets of investment funds that are supervised and regulated by the Central Bank and authorised by us here, I think around 85% of their assets are in commercial property and about 15% are in residential. Now, this is a big change in the nature of financing that we have seen over the past 15 to 20 years. We have seen a growing role of investment funds in the commercial property market in particular. They are a much smaller proportion of residential properties. As the financial system changes, it is also important that the regulatory framework evolves with it. Last year we introduced measures to guard against risks stemming from leverage and also what we call liquidity mismatch inthese plans. These are very much from the perspective of how we can ensure this form of financing is resilient at different points in the cycle and is not there in good times and disappears in bad times. It does not get into issues like the Deputy was talking about in terms of impact on pricing or rents, which of course are the much broader social issues rather than being within the mandate of the Central Bank.

The Deputy also talked about people renting for a long time. This also relates to these broader housing challenges we have had in Ireland for a number of years now, this persistent mismatch between the growing demand for housing and the supply of housing. That is an issue that is not just about the overall volume of supply, but the composition of supply also matters, whether it is private, affordable or social. That is also an important consideration. On this, there are a number of factors that have led to housing supply to be more sluggish. It has picked up. We are now at around close to 30,000 a year. Interestingly, we have seen a sharp slowdown in the commercial real estate market recently, partly because of rising interest rates but also because of some of the structural changes like working from home, which means demand for offices has fallen. One of the things we are getting in terms of our engagement as we try to understand what is happening in the economy is that some of the construction labour that might have been used for the construction of commercial property might now also be available for residential property, which can ease some of the significant constraints that are there in terms of housing supply. I will stop here on these issues and maybe colleagues might want to pick up.