Dr. Robert Kelly:

Rents certainly did grow through the Celtic tiger. I only did it recently and I was kind of surprised at it but if you chart out how rents and prices evolved, you find house prices grew far quicker than rents even through the Celtic tiger years. During the Celtic tiger years, the reality was that housing became more of a speculative asset, as the Deputy pointed out. People bought housing as second homes or with a view to renting them out. Looking at more recently, rents and house prices have almost gone in parallel. That is a much clearer sign of an imbalance between housing demand and supply. We had less of that imbalance back in 2006 and 2007. As the Deputy said, we got close to up to 96,000 units. We were in the middle of a credit-driven, speculative housing boom back then.