Mr. John McCarthy:

I do not know the particular estate the Deputy is talking about, but in general terms because of this investment programme, the quantum of voids and boarded-up houses is very much reduced. I can recall talking to the team in South Dublin where I think from memory it has a social housing stock of just over 6,000 units and at any point in time it would have about 40 that would be in that category. Some of those are units that are boarded up for very short periods. In terms of estate management, as soon as a unit is vacated, the local authorities very often will need to go in and secure the unit to avoid antisocial behaviour or otherwise. It can actually be boarded up for short periods.

Fundamentally going back a number of years ago when we introduced this significantly increased voids programme, the situation we faced was that we were still in a very resource-constrained environment, as were local authorities, and yet we were seeing increasing numbers of vacant units. In terms of addressing the housing situation we face, the first step has to be if we have a specific number of vacant units, we need to get those back into stock so that we can get families into them. That was why even in the resource-constrained times we found ourselves in, we siphoned off a line of funding to support local authorities to bring those back into use because otherwise they would have just continued to lie idle.