Conall MacCoille

We'll see if, you know, there's very deep viability issue, which is very difficult to address.

Well, the numbers there have been actually encouraging.

At the start of the year, there seemed to be an extraordinary amount of hysteria around the fact that the end 2024 number was a little bit weaker than expected.

It was an even 30,000.

So 32,000 are built over the past 12 months.

It's actually the highest level since the Celtic Tiger era.

So a lot of the kind of doomsday projections that home building might be as weak as 25,000 clearly have proven well wide of the mark.

True, but we've seen some improvement.

If you look at the, there's only one survey for Dublin, which shows how many houses are currently under construction.

And that shows that the number is actually up 27% over the past 12 months.

So, you know, we do have another two to three year flow of apartments currently under construction.

We'll see completions tick up.

We're sticking with our forecast for just under 35,000.

But having said that, look, we're well wide of where we need to be.

We need to be building 40,000 to 50,000 to kind of eat into that pent-up demand that's been built up over the past 10 years.

Well, I heard some people describe it as a boring budget, which I think is pretty extraordinary when expenditure is planned to rise, planned to increase by 8% next year, which by any normal measure is an extraordinary rate of increase.

And this is in the context of tax revenue growth, which appears to be slowing.

spending consistently outstripping the government's own targets and plans and a very uncertain global environment.

The corporate tax base is expected to be just over 33 billion next year.

We're planning to run a surplus of 5 billion.