Mr. Ciaran McDonnell:

I will try to deal with some of the questions. Regarding the 2,000 to 3,000 thatched properties, we believe there is a database of the addresses in the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage. When the Department was conducting its survey, it told us it was able to send out a printed hard-copy version of the survey to about 2,000 thatched properties around the country. That is one of the actions that has been taken, albeit it has never been confirmed formally to us.

We are in the process of trying to form a thatched property owners group. This is for a couple of reasons. One is so that we have a more coherent lobby voice but our idea is also that if we get enough people to join such a group, we might be able to form a thatched insurance group scheme. Using insurance group schemes has been a method in other sectors to try to solve the problem of availability and affordability, and it was used in the crèche sector and the outdoor activities sector. The difficulty with forming a group scheme is that it is hard to make it commercially viable, and the estimate we have is that we need at least 1,000 properties to be part of the group. That figure of 1,000 is based on an annual premium for that group scheme of about €1 million, which is the magic number, if we like, to make it commercially viable.

As part of collecting names and addresses to form our thatched property owners group, we have about 170 people signed up so far. We asked a few basic questions about their buildings and about two thirds of the respondents so far say their building is a listed building or a registered structure, and the other third say it is not, with those tending to be the newer properties like thatched holiday homes and so on. Some may just not be on the register because they are not known about from a heritage survey point of view. Hopefully, that covers most of the questions.