Pat Casey (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the CSO for the information it provides for us. Without the facts and data provided, it would be very hard to make decisions. I have taken a number of points from the information provided.

Home ownership is at its lowest level since 1971, while average household size has increased for the first time since 1966. The average age of home owners is also increasing. There is a movement towards rental accommodation in urban centres as the main source of accommodation. There are one or two other interesting figures, specifically that there has been an increase of 270% in the number of holiday homes in Dublin city centre. We all know about the advent of Airbnb and how it is impacting on the housing market. We will probably need to look at it a little more closely.

We are all coming back to vacant properties. The figure for converted flats is 30% and for apartments, 13.5%. We hope that in dealing with the housing crisis the will offer easy win solutions. What is interesting about the statistics - this is why it is fantastic to have them - is that the CSO has been able to break down the vacancies into various categories. Almost 45% of vacant properties are in rural areas, outside small towns. This might make it more difficult to get our hands on them and convert them. The CSO was able to assign a reason for vacancy to more than 30% of properties. The enumerators were able to obtain this information. When we exclude rural areas - the figures would distort other trends - the reasons are almost the same, with variations of 1.5% to 2%, in city centre areas, small and large towns. This gives us a great indication as to the reasons houses are vacant and how we can tackle the issue.

I thank the CSO for the information provided which is critical in enabling us to make decisions. I do not know whether we can extrapolate information from the data and assign reasons for vacancy to the other 70% of properties. That might be a step too far. My background is working in a hotel and we used to dread census night. It was an absolute nightmare. Thankfully, I did not have to do it last year. Is the number of families living in hotels recorded in the census?