Mr. Barry Lynch:

It will depend on a couple of variables.

Essentially, while the subsidies available for affordable housing schemes will come in at, say, €50,000, €75,000 or €100,000, depending on the city area, it also depends on density. That density relates to cost ceilings. For argument's sake, if €400,000 is the ceiling for a house in a density of between 35 and 50, someone could then get a grant of €75,000, which would bring the cost down to approximately €325,000. What purchasers ultimately pay depends on their circumstances. They have to borrow the maximum they are allowed under macroprudential rules and, therefore, while the house might be at a certain cost, there a small gap between what is paid and what the shared equity would be. We could not definitively say that one person could buy a house for that price. We try to bring the schemes back into the local authority home-loan threshold, which is €320,000 for Meath. There is a slight inconsistency between the first-home scheme and the local authority home loan in that the threshold for Meath in the scheme is €350,000, whereas the local authority loan is €320,000. A few kinks probably need to be ironed out of the system.