Seán Ó Fearghaíl (Kildare South, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

During the course of the last week, the Governor of the Central Bank, Gabriel Makhlouf, entered the debate on housing. He did so in response to a Government initiative calling for greater liquidity for developers and builders. He told us that the banks are well capitalised and have plenty of money to lend but that they would do so subject to their own lending criteria and risk assessment. If you talk to builders, particularly small and medium-sized builders and developers, across the country, they will tell you that one of their greatest difficulties is sourcing capital. Their contribution to the housing problem could be immense if they had the funding to build houses at a small scale, which, individually, might not be great, but which cumulatively would have a huge effect. What the Governor of the Central Bank did not address was the issue of the regulatory regime. We are a country which has a history of extremes when it comes to regulation, including extremes of ineffectual regulation or non-implementation of regulation and then, when something goes wrong, we come up with a host of extremely excessive regulations, which we have been implementing to the detriment of the construction sector. I would not suggest for a minute that we go back to the lunacy of the past but we need to loosen the purse strings to enable people at local level to build more affordable units that people locally can buy.

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