Mr. John McCarthy:

There are projects of 60 or 70 units. I do not have it all in front of me. The size of a project will be very much determined by its location and development more generally in the area. A very large number of projects are either on site or have been fully cleared in the tender process and will deliver units this year or next year. We are adding to that pipeline every week. When we come to produce the quarter one progress report, we will produce an updated version of the construction status report and the extent to which the pipeline has been added to, and the broader progress within the pipeline over the course of that quarter will be evident. We will do that every quarter from here on.

Part V is 10% of housing yield on sites of nine or more housing units. Obviously, it is critically dependent on private housing supply coming on stream, but as the Deputy knows, there were amendments made to the Part V regime so that the use of cash payments is no longer allowed.

We expect to see Part V delivery continue to accelerate over the next few years as private housing supply in larger schemes of more than nine units accelerates.

I do not want to get into a policy debate on the use of public lands for mixed tenure housing. The policy rationale is set out in Rebuilding Ireland. Much of the commentary regarding the need to try to accelerate housing supply overall concerns the fact that relying on private housing supply to the extent it was relied on before is taking too long. Many people argue for the use of public lands in the short to medium term as a vehicle for delivering mixed tenure housing for social housing, rental and purchase.

Regarding targeted activity, every local authority in 2015, I think, was given a programme of targets for the 2015 to 2017 period, and those targets were influenced by the social housing needs assessment as it stood then. We have a new social housing needs assessment now, the results of which were published at the end of last year, and we have committed to setting new targets for local authorities in the second quarter of this year, which again will be influenced by the new outcome of the social housing needs assessment. This will see the available resources targeted on the areas of greatest need, as the social housing needs assessment tells us, but this will be on a local authority basis. I think we have spoken previously in the committee about what happens within local authority areas. We are very reliant on the local authority to identify and prioritise the projects within its area and identify where it feels they should be located, as opposed to there being a central instruction to local authorities to start picking out individual sites. We rely on the local authority to come forward to us in this regard.

In general with Rebuilding Ireland, we are trying to set out on a multi-strand housing journey to deliver on the targets that have been set. This involves a range of elements, including building, purchasing, leasing and the buy-and-renew and repair-and-leasing schemes. All theses schemes contribute to what we want to achieve, and the mix of these ingredients will change over time as different programmes grow in importance. Overall, a pool of funding in excess of €900 million was available to us last year to deliver on housing programmes. We utilised the full resource to ensure delivery of the maximum amount of output through all the different strands of activity, including building, buying and all the others I mentioned. This year, we have a significantly increased pool of resources available to us. It is €1.3 billion in total. To give the committee a sense of the increased momentum, already in 2017 we have spent the same capital amount of money as we had spent at 2 September last year. That gives a sense of the extent to which the programme and the level of activity is building up, and we are now at a much increased and much more uniform pace of delivery over the course of the year. Again, housing will see a further significant capital increase in 2018. Part of our activity this year, as I said, is building the pipeline of projects that will be able to avail of that funding next year. We used all our housing capital money last year, we will use all of it this year, and we are preparing to make sure we will be in a position to use all our housing funding again in 2018 so that we deliver as much as we possibly can from the resources available to us.