Mr. Ivan Grimes:

I will take the questions in order. I agree with Ms Curley. I was thinking slightly optimistically at three years but three to four years sounds about right in terms of the timeline from conception to actual delivery. The Part 8 process has worked fairly smoothly for us in Waterford and there have not been any major issues. In the event of judicial review, we would certainly be talking about years.

With regard to an affordable price, in Waterford it is more a question of the income at which people can afford an affordable house. We are pitching that at somewhere around early €50,000-plus of gross household income up to €75,000 or €76,000. That is the way we are looking at the application process for those three schemes in Waterford, to which Mr. Walsh referred. We are looking at the income level rather than the price per sebecause the price the purchaser pays will depend on the level of the mortgage he or she can get plus the subsidy that comes from the affordable housing fund.

With regard to the housing list, time is obviously a key determinant but there are other factors that are taken into account, such as transfers, overcrowding and so on.

The issue of buying private rented properties where tenants are in HAP or RAS is one we are keeping under active consideration on a case-by-case basis. I am very conscious that there has been a bit of an exodus of landlords from both RAS and HAP and if we were to consider buying all of them, I do not think we would have sufficient resources from the capital programme.