Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

For the information of the House, it is my understanding that I am meeting the committee next week and I look forward to exploring some concepts with the members and also hearing their ideas.

On the finance issue, it is true that there is a lot of available finance now. The Housing Finance Agency, for example, can borrow money at low interest rates now but that was not the case until relatively recently, so to talk about the housing crisis as it was or was not responded to in the past five years, assuming things were as they are now four or five years ago, is political amnesia. That is not the way it was at the time. We had a broken construction industry that was not capable of building houses and was incapable of getting finance to do it, even if it could do it. That is now changed and it is my job to ramp up capacity as quickly as possible and to fund it as intelligently as possible in order that we can get margin back into building and get housing output up again.

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