Mr. John Sheahan:

Yes, if I may. I am coming at this from the point of view that one can set targets, aspirations and objectives, or whatever word one wants to use, all one likes; it is the delivery of action that is the key indicator on which success or otherwise on affordable housing will be judged. The term "affordable housing" alone is somewhat strange when one sees some of the prices at which affordable houses are coming in, so I would not get too hung up on the terms. There is a cohort of people earning salaries from perhaps €35,000 up to even as far as about €70,000 who are totally disenfranchised in our market. As we have said in our presentation, we will not dwell on Members' ideology as to whether they want all publicly owned lands to have public housing or whether they want the market to produce them through a developer or similar. There is, however, something broken within our market at the moment and it is a matter of supply versus demand. If the supply gets ramped up, the affordability, which is not there at the moment, will come back into the system. I agree with Senator Fitzpatrick about the six-month timeline. You need responses and you need to put in those indicators such that if a proposal is made, a time is set on it and it will be delivered within that time. As we have said in our statement, if delivery does not happen, somebody somewhere is accountable for that. At present, however, with the centralised system, we find as local authority members that we go to our housing strategic policy committees, SPCs, and our main plenary meetings and hear "we will come back to you on that" or "we need to clarify this, that or the other with the Department", which leaves us in total no man's land. The impetus should be given back to the local authorities and we should not get hung up too much on what term is used for this. Delivery of numbers is the key.