Mr. Aidan O'Hogan:

I would like to make one correction. The Senator is correct that levies are payable under the Derelict Sites Act. If sites are left derelict, they are levied.

The Senator also referred to houses elsewhere in the country and people being reasonable about the prices, but outside Dublin, the prices at which they are being sold are below the construction cost alone in most cases, ignoring site costs and so on. It is not, therefore, a matter of whether builders are reasonable in the current market; it is a question of what one can get for them, and more often than not it is less than they cost to construct new. I am not sure how the way the Senator is thinking could resolve the situation unless somebody is building a one-off house for themselves. Outside Dublin, Cork and the other urban centres, one can buy a house for far less than it would cost to build it, even leaving the site value out of it.