Mr. John McCarthy:

If we get a submission, we will come back to the Deputy on the matter. There would certainly have been engagement and involvement with the local authority. I do not know to what extent there would have been involvement between the different wings of the local authority. The local authority would have been heavily involved in the process.

Deputy Ó Broin referred to something I may have said on the previous occasion about HFA borrowing. I cannot remember offhand what I said. This ties in with another point the Deputy raised about reclassifications. HFA borrowings by local authorities are on-balance sheet. It is in that same sort of space. Borrowings by approved housing bodies, as matters stand and provided the project is appropriately structured, would not be on-balance sheet.

As the Deputy rightly points out, there has been an exercise through EUROSTAT and the National Audit Office in the UK, which looked at what we call approved housing there. They were brought on balance sheet and a similar exercise was undertaken in Northern Ireland. There is an exercise under way here between EUROSTAT, the Central Statistics Office, ourselves and the approved housing body, AHB, sector. A number of the larger approved housing bodies are working very closely to engage with the Central Statistics Office, CSO, which is the national body for statistics and will be the ultimate conduit back to EUROSTAT. It will probably come to finality in the second half of the year. There are a number of factors taken into account as part of that. The funding arrangements are an element but there are also matters concerning where risk is shared between different parties and who controls the asset etc. There are a number of elements and we are looking at all of them in order to ensure the best case is made. We will have to deal with the outcome.