Mr. Barry O'Leary:

We are quite happy to continue with the 40-year lending period. As AHBs will have paid off the mortgage with us after 40 years, we would have no further control over them. Obviously, AHBs cannot make distributions because they do not have shareholders or anything to pay out on. That would be a different situation to the limited-profit organisations to which the Senator referred. Currently, we are not mandated to lend to anybody outside of local authority, AHB and university sectors. It depends on whether it was ever allowed by the Government - we would look at it if it did - but we have no plans in that area. The designation Mr. Baneham spoke of 50 years for cost rental is fine but it is a longer period than our mortgage so we just focus on the 40 years.

On the co-operative housing, I do not know anything about the scheme in Dún Laoghaire except to say that Co-operative Housing Ireland is one of our larger customers in the business we are doing with AHBs. They certainly are in good standing with us.

On CPO front, we are aware of the target of 2,500 properties. We think that €1 billion or €1.25 billion could be provided on that. We are in a position to provide funding and probably see it being turned over fairly quickly. You should buy the thing, do whatever needs to be done to the house and make it available and sell it so that the money could be revolved fairly quickly. On the assumption that we are lending to local authorities for those CPOs, we would lend at a very low if not a no-cost rate on the assumption that it was turned over within a two- to five-year period. I would not like to be lending much money on an interest-only basis for longer than five years. What do we want to do here? We want to get houses back in supply. We would be quite happy to engage in a positive way with local authorities in a positive way for CPOs.