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 that 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.

I thank Deputy Ó Fearghaíl. That is why the work of Home Building Finance Ireland, HBFI, is important. As the Deputy does, I absolutely support the need for our banks to be safe and well regulated. During the awful time of the pandemic, I had many reasons to be reminded of the value of a financial sector in Ireland that is safe and well capitalised.

The point the Deputy makes regarding how we can support smaller builders is the reason HBFI was put in place. It has been there for a few years and we do need to look at its work and if it needs to be supported further to deal with the issues he raises. The Deputy is correct that while every individual set of homes, of themselves, might not be huge, they still matter to the families and homeowners that go into them and, cumulatively, they can make a difference. I thank him for raising the issue.