Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister. The problem is that there are two ways of addressing this issue. The first is that houses are built and sold at cost price and, in that scenario, the price can be determined at the outset. The alternative is to take a market price at a discount, but that discount must be repaid. That second model is of shared equity, as the Minister has just mentioned. The difficulty is that when that model was used most recently, when Fianna Fáil was most recently in government, it caused problems when the crash of 2008 happened because, under the old shared ownership scheme, 44% of shared ownership householders fell into significant mortgage arrears in the years that followed. That was four times the mortgage arrears rate for the overall economy.

Shared equity is not affordability. Rather, it is simply a way to get around the Central Bank's sensible macroprudential rules. Will the Minister opt for the full-cost recovery model which would allow for the delivery of genuinely affordable homes - at prices in Dublin, for example, of €230,000 or less - or will he go for the shared equity model, under which people have an initial price of €250,000 or €260,000 but ultimately must pay more than €300,000 because, as the Minister said, they must repay 40% in addition to the mortgage? That latter option is not genuine affordability.

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