Mr. Paul Benson:

There is an open door with the Department around application for resources. Donegal County Council has applied over the past year, and extra resources have been sanctioned on a couple of occasions. Mayo County Council has not. If it wants to make an application, we would be glad to process it. I am sure it would get a positive response. On the longer term resources we need, the scheme is very much going to be administration-based for the local authorities, with a little bit of technical input. Most of the technical input is now moving to the Housing Agency. When it comes to paying the grants, it will be the local authority paying the grants and it will have to carry out an inspection to ensure the work has been done and that the €50,000 or so that has been claimed represents reasonably what has been spent. That would be the local authority's role. The big technical work is going to be done on local authorities' own stock and they would need significant resources to manage both their own stock and those construction projects. Local authorities are the owners and they will have to manage the projects. It will be a shift for the local authorities from what they are doing now to what they will be doing in the future. The Housing Agency will step in and take on that huge heavy lifting technical brief.