Mr. Coil?n O'Reilly:

I do not have the figures on affordable housing by year but I can circulate it later. The pipeline for affordable purchase is 1,802 and cost rental is 2,514.

In terms of voids, we are probably at about 16 weeks at this stage. We currently have 505 voids, which is 1.9% of our overall stock. That sounds like a lot, but out of an overall stock of 26,000 it is relatively low. We do have a lot of churn in our system. Some 245 of the voids are currently with contractors and 128 are with our own direct labour. We are hopeful of bringing a lot of those back in before Christmas. We are drawing down all the budget and any extra budget is always helpful. I might as well say that while I am here.

In terms of new staff, we have taken on eight what we are calling housing delivery managers. They are programme managers who will deal with a lot of the paperwork, process and decision-making and put it all into a format so that we can streamline our housing delivery processes. We have eight coming in to assist with the delivery of affordable housing.

The article in The Irish Timesis probably based on our competitive dialogue process. We were very disappointed. At this stage, I think we have nearly 21,000 inactivated planning permissions in Dublin city. We saw that as an opportunity. We tried to work out how we could unlock this conundrum of why there are people who have invested in planning permission but they are not delivering homes. We have to work out what the barrier is. We went out. We had 44 expressions of interest and we only had one submission. We are out again now looking for turnkey delivery and we are hopeful to go out again to look for a development agreement with people to deliver on our behalf in the near future. That is a conundrum we have to work out. As interest rates start to go up, there might be more opportunity if people who have leveraged themselves, who have borrowed money to purchase the land and for the planning, come under more pressure and that might create opportunity. It is incumbent on us as local authority officials to continue to go back to that market, engage with it, try to unlock the conundrum and create opportunities for people to come in to us and see if they will partner with us for the delivery of homes.