Mr. Hugh Brennan:

As I said, Dublin City Council has been very supportive. It recognised that our model works in Ballymun and it has said directly to us that it would like to keep us in Ballymun, which is fine for Dublin City Council. We are engaging with Cork City Council in regard to a very interesting scheme in that area.

My next response also answers Deputy Ó Broin's question on the serviced sites fund. It is a scheme that was put out for public expressions of interest in Boherboy. It is 80% affordable and 20% social. There are 147 units in the scheme. They are making full use of the serviced sites fund, which is around €50,000 per site. They want to recoup the value of that land at €2 million and they mentioned charging developing levies, although I would say that would probably be up for negotiation. When we do our figures, if we are paying the €2 million, we are adding around €13,000 per unit. If we are also paying development levies, that adds probably another €5,000 per unit. That would push our selling price from around €200,000 to €220,000. The inclusion of the serviced sites fund brings the price back down a bit. It seems as though one fund is being used to offset another, but that is okay because the aggregate is that we can still provide affordable housing in that area.

With other local authorities we can get the closed door. There is a protocol in place. When local authorities are dealing with approved housing bodies, they will identify a piece of land and put it out to a number of approved housing bodies, depending on the use they want for that land. Usually, that is not for affordable housing. Dublin and Cork city councils are exceptions. We identified a piece of land at Mullinastill Road, which members may know is a large piece of land of approximately 4 ha with room for approximately 400 units. We have put a proposal in relation to that land to the council. The council told us that the site is not serviced and it has not submitted an application for it to the serviced sites fund. However, as there would be 400 units on the site and the services currently stop about 200 yards down the road, we would be willing to run the services in and spread that cost among the houses and still be able to deliver at an affordable rate. What we are asking of the local authorities is more engagement with us. If there is a piece of land that can be used, we can help them to bring it into use.

That is what we would like from the local authorities. Other local authorities around the country have been in contact with us. We were talking to Galway County Council recently. It has a scheme in Ballinasloe. Ballinasloe is interesting in that probably every house being built in Ballinasloe for the open market is affordable anyway. The council wants a mixed tenure project. We are more than happy to talk to it provided we know that we can pre-sell, because that is important to our model as it allows us to attract funding.

With regard to other landbanks, we have been arguing for a while that the IDA needs to make some of its land available for affordable housing. It is attracting big companies into the country, but where are their employees going to live? It would be a huge incentive to companies coming in if they knew that land was available for affordable housing in the area. There is an IDA park in Bray, which I have mentioned before. A couple of big companies in that park have approached us to say that their employees cannot rent or buy in the area. They are going out as far as Kilcock, Maynooth and so on and it is taking them whatever amount of time to travel out to Bray. These companies know that they are going to lose those employees. There are approximately 30 acres of IDA land available 8 km away in Greystones. We do not want 30 acres. We would take 12-----