Mr. Gareth McMahon:

One of the representatives of Free Market raised the idea of having a dedicated town architect or town renewal expert, who would have a broad brief in terms of the findings of the pilot scheme. Senator Coffey asked a question about the pilot scheme. The challenge is how we can get people to live in properties that were once units with a small shop on the ground floor and a residential dwelling upstairs. Most of those properties are unoccupied. The challenge is how to get them occupied given the current planning and design restrictions and accessibility issues. How can we get people to occupy the upstairs unit of a property with a retail outlet operating on the ground floor? Those problems can be resolved but it may be beyond the ability of the average small shop owner who has such a property and does not know what to do with it. It would be helpful to have access to the level of expertise that was mentioned and for such an expert to carry some of load for that small shop owner. Two or three property holders on a block on a street could be brought together and they might be advised that individually they cannot do anything but together they could probably do something. Shaffrey Architects did some work on our behalf on our pilot project on a one-off basis. They identified a small number of clusters of properties adjacent to each other which, combined, could be worth developing into an space suitable for occupation or for some other use but individually there may be no merit in developing them. That is the type of expertise Mr. Laurence Lord reflected on which perhaps should be available permanently. That is the type of expertise needed, whether it be architectural-led or planning-led, to be managed by a person who has the time to do that and where such a job is not seen as one more job to add to a long list of other jobs the person has to do.