Mr. Michael McCarthy:

-----and that might not be abundantly clear. I remember, for example, at one point there was a 50% increase in planning appeals to An Bord Pleanála and it sounded voluminous but there were two planning applications. When that headline sentence was broken down, you discovered there was a thinking behind it. In terms of housing stock and the level of which and the length of time houses are vacant, sometimes that can depend on the manner in which the local authority prepares that house for reallocation. It might use private contractors and it might have dedicated units within its own local authority and that might impinge on the dates. That is not a panacea to understanding why the lengths of time are what they are in some particular cases but it does give a thinking for the reasons or the drivers behind that particular piece of data.

Regarding our performance indicators and inspections, we had to refine the performance indicator inspections because some inspections failed on minor issues. Again, the headline figure presented as a fail, as if the house must be ready to collapse, but they were minor issues so we therefore had to refine our PI to reflect, within reason, the reasons for that kind of inspection failure report.