Cillian Woods

I know it's going to the for sale market.

a lot of these apartments.

But when we're talking about the state stepping in and spending 120 grand to fund an apartment that they feel wouldn't be built if they didn't step in, it's a form of affordable housing, even if it is on the open market for sale.

It's in the same way that you're adding first home scheme, adding in help to buy.

The state has gotten...

very, very deep into a scheme here that we can see is delivering very, very few apartments, like 2,600 apartments over longer than five years is pittance in what they really need.

When we need, we're pretty much at a, the state is building 35,000 roughly homes last year.

The whole gap between 35,000 to 50,000 or 60,000 won't be houses.

It'll have to be apartments.

So this is a tiny speck in the market that the state has tried to intervene in spending hundreds of millions of euro way, way ahead, tracking way ahead of budget and still can't get on top of it.

And where does the money keep coming for 500 million?

When they bought those, what they would, I'm not picking these as examples, specific examples and these sites as specific examples.

When these sort of sites they were piecing together in the, about 10 years ago, maybe 10 years ago, I think they would have been about, they would have been pricing about 300,000 to build an apartment.

Now we're looking at prices spiralling upwards.

It's easily into the high 400,000s to build apartments outside of Dublin.

And as I said in Dublin earlier, it's 550,000 outside the M50 belt and 605,000 inside the M50 belt to build apartments now.

That's what they would push back and say.

That's the sort of cost inflation they're having to deal with, which is why the state's having to step in.

And they say, we'd be building them otherwise if we felt we didn't need the subsidy and we felt there was a market for them.

And they feel there is a market because they're willing to take the subsidy to actually take a punt on building these and assume some of the risk.