Mr. Dara McGowan:

At the moment, we have 34 sites on the derelict sites register and we have another 49 which are at the notice issued stage. We first issue a notice and we then dedicate resources to deal with those people and try to see whether they can bring improvements to their property before it goes onto the derelict sites register. Since we have done that in the last two or three years, it has been very successful. For most of the notices we now send, the properties are not brought back into use but they have been tidied up from an aesthetic point of view. When we make the derelict sites register, we charge the levy. There is currently just over €500,000 owed and, to date, we have not received anything. Generally, most of the cases we deal with involve elderly people who have a property, cannot afford to do anything with it or could not get a loan to do anything with it. Many people have properties that are in dispute, where one person wants to sell it and the other wants to keep it, or they could be in probate or in receivership, where the bank might have a certain charge on it. These cases turn out to be very complicated. We keep the levy on them. We are currently investigating with our law agent if we can put a charge on the property.