Ms Caroline Timmons:

To come to that point, in the first place, the Department has a role in providing strategic workforce planning across local authorities and working with local authorities, but it is, in fact, the chief executive who is responsible for the resourcing of any given area in the local authority, so those decisions lie with that chief executive. However, in the vacant homes area, since 2018, in order to try to bring that work forward, we started providing funding for a designated officer to be put in place, and that was €50,000 at the time. Since Housing for All, we have upped that to €60,000. What we did as part of that ask was to ask them to make that a full-time officer in recognition of some of the issues that the Deputy has just outlined, for example, perhaps they were wearing too many hats in the local authority and the chief executive was asking for people to do a lot of different things. A lot of the factors that the Deputy is mentioning are very true. The simple fact is there are so many things to do and we are asking local authorities to do a lot, and they do not have enough resources to do it, so I can understand that, sometimes, the same person is doing a few jobs.

In the vacancy space, we have got a vacant homes office in the first place, so the €60,000 is offered for the office, and we are then requiring that the vacant homes officer be full-time. We have also given additional funding to that office and, as part of the vacant property refurbishment grant, we offer up to €180,000 in additional funding to process applications under that grant. Therefore, there is additional funding and, indeed, Cork County Council drew down €120,000 of that funding over the last while. We have been providing the resources but what we want to do now, because we are asking them to do even more in the vacancy space, is to check that that is enough. As part of the review of the overall vacancy grant which we are bringing forward and the new measures that we will be putting in place, we have asked them to make sure they have the resources in place. We expect there will be an uptick in the number of people applying for the grant, so we need to make sure the vacant homes office is adequately staffed.