Professor John FitzGerald:

We should look to the experience of the Housing Executive in Northern Ireland. I was a member of the Northern Ireland Authority for Energy Regulation in the last decade for four years and during my time the authority undertook two very interesting experiments. One was conducted in Aughnacloy, another was conducted where there had been a major massacre in the previous 20 years, and another one was in a Protestant village. The authority discovered that if one said one wanted to offer the whole village one got much more acceptance whereas if one were a 70-year old, like myself, who lived up the side of a mountain in County Donegal, one would be scared of being burgled, done or whatever. If one provides a scheme on a community basis one is more likely to get buy-in, particularly in rural areas.

As I said in Kilkenny, people do not know what is the right thing to do. They may be willing to do the right thing. The Northern Ireland Housing Executive which has a much larger local authority housing stock has experience of ramping up and I want to get some of its people down to talk to us about how to do that. When I spoke to a person at the margins of a meeting, he said the lesson is that one goes in and offer the same for all houses, one does not differentiate. I want to tease out this point. Learning from what has happened elsewhere is the key. In many cases we think we know the best way and we may do things more efficiently, but actually the Northern Ireland Housing Executive is an interesting example which we need to look at.