Mr. John McCarthy:

In the first instance we would not have been approving the lands, as such. We would have looked at the borrowing proposals from the local authority and made an initial assessment to the effect that it was broadly suitable for social housing purposes. What has happened in the intervening period is that some parts of some sites may have been used for road widening or other purposes. They may have had impacts on their potential use for housing. It is not that they will not be usable for housing, they may be, only on a lesser scale. Moreover, there have been some changes in development plans and this, in turn, means that some sites may be a more long-term prospect rather than a short-term prospect now.

In the case of the 25 sites that were not accepted into the scheme I will outline the way we would have looked at it. If a project came forward on a given site at a given time, we would have asked whether we should approve it. For example, some of the sites adverted to in the Comptroller and Auditor General's report had issues in respect of an illegal activity or illegal development. Therefore, the local authority could not have come to us seeking to build a social housing project there. We would have expected the local authority to deal with these issues before such sites could be considered suitable for inclusion in the scheme. In many cases such issues can be dealt with and the sites may ultimately be usable for housing purposes. It is simply that we were not satisfied at that point because of the possibility of taking across sites with issues attaching to them which we would have been left to resolve.