Ms Caroline Timmons:

When looking at the planning and the Deputy’s view that it is painfully slow, I understand what she means. Sometimes developments can take years to come to fruition. However, it is interesting that, when one gets a more global view of what has been going on over the years, there has actually been loads of small developments. They are not necessarily at scale, but they are there. Interestingly, when we were talking to the Irish Council for Social Housing recently, it was looking at nearly 9,000 units of older people’s accommodation that it identified that AHBs are running at the minute. There is actually quite a bit of scale there, it is just not easily identifiable perhaps. It seems slow, but there is progress on it and we are kind of making progress in the local authority sector in particular on it. There is pipeline on that.

In terms of the planning for it, I agree with the Deputy that it needs to come through the HNDA. The housing areas of the local authorities need to be aware of the demographics. One way they can do that is by looking at the HNDA repository on our website, which will give a full view of an area’s demographics out for a space of a number of years. They can see how many in their population will be over 65 and they can think about it from that space. As I said earlier, they can then translate that into housing delivery action plans. They can set their targets in respect of older people, in particular in social housing developments and what they may need to do, and they can think about where they should plan them.

There is a very good example in Kells of using vacancy as another element. One does not just have to do social housing. There is a development in Kells that Meath Count Council is bringing through. It is using some vacant housing as part of the older people’s housing that it is bringing forward there. One can use many different tools to bring forward older people’s housing. That is a very good development. I will give my colleagues time to come back on the other question.