Mr. Conor Skehan:

I thank Deputy Daly for her kind words about the role of the agency. We have only been here since 2010 and are trying to put ourselves in a central position so there is one source of objective data and ideas that does not have skin in the game. With great gratitude to the Department, we have been told to go off and be more independent, more like the EPA and An Bord Pleanála, and to tell the Department things it needs to hear even if it does not want to hear them. We are going to continue to do that.

The Deputy's question allows me to answer another which I neglected to follow through on with Deputy Wallace. When we talk about scale, it is not necessarily about building 500 units all in the same place. For instance, going back to Deputy Coppinger's figure of 100,000 units in the next ten years, we as Ireland Inc. might go to the market for ten years' worth of roofing tiles, windows, doors and radiators, and buy a range of them so that the architects who are designing 50 units here and five there have a variety available to them. Ireland Inc. would then have bought at scale, using procurement as a weapon in our favour instead of a scourge on our backs. That is one of the ways in which scale could operate. It is certainly relevant to Deputy Wallace's point that our needs can often be met by developments of three, five and 35 units, especially outside Dublin. We have to remember that we have a whole country to deal with here.

To go back to Deputy Daly's point, we not only have vacant houses but under-utilised houses. There are 1,500 small towns and villages in Ireland. If we challenged each of those to bring forward four new houses every year that would be 6,000 a year which, as Mr. O'Connor said, would both bring villages back to life and allow us to reach those very onerous targets very quickly. We would also be spreading the benefit out and using the installed houses and the streets, sewers, pubs and shops that surround them. We would achieve many goals at the same time. All that comes from regarding housing not as a building exercise but in terms of managing our housing stock, part of which is building, part of which is renewing and part of which is bringing back into use.

The last point was about ageing. Mr. O'Connor will talk about this. The Deputy is absolutely right about trying to free up existing stock. We have to learn from our neighbours in Britain and see the disaster that was the poll tax, the disaster that was trying to get older people to leave their homes. Sticks do not work; we have to use honey and carrots to get people out. Exactly as the Deputy said, we have to give them something that is so attractive that they would want to leave their houses for something better in the same area with the same parish priest and pharmacy that they have been used to. That is the way forward to increase the yield out of what we have. It is about managing as much as building.