Mr. Barry Lynch:

Neither of us would have high levels of voids anyway. We have been set an annual target by the Department and allocated funding for it. It is a capped grant of €11,000 currently for each property. If anything else needs to be done, we do it out of our own resources. An energy retrofit may need to go into a unit as well. As I said in response to Senator Cummins, we are moving to a more planned maintenance approach and that should mean voids will become a thing of the past. We will be doing cyclical maintenance and ensuring our stock is kept up to standard on an ongoing basis. This is the intention and it is, as I understand it, where funding is going to be directed in the future, rather than towards voids funding. This approach was undertaken especially around 2014 during the depths of the financial crisis to get as many units as possible back into use. It has been tapering off since. Planned maintenance, however, will be the way forward in future and we should not be seeing the level of voids witnessed previously.