Mr. Ciar?n O'Connor:

If I take the Deputy's last question first, that is the whole reason we wanted to go to the two storeys. To be fair, we got a good response from the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth which could have said it was nothing to do with it and that it only wanted the emergency stuff. It would have been a serious miss, the State having put in that level of effort and got a lot of issues resolved in a very short time. The Mahon project will be open in two weeks' time, 11 months from when the Government gave us the go-ahead to do it. Social housing is taking three to five years. It is not quite comparing like with like. I always believe that if we have enough focus and brain power, we will solve the problem. We have cracked the nut of how to do it. The question now is to build the confidence. I have been talking to the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage about how there could be spin-off and benefit. I hope that will continue. We will work together collaboratively.

With regard to the sites element, the view was taken that no social housing sites could be used. That excluded the more normal, sensible sites and we were left with these sites that were left over. Each local authority was asked which site it had. There was some off-loading going on where people said, "We've had that site for years, let's get rid of it." That was why we were finding that 85% of the sites offered to us were not usable. Maybe it was not the best use of our time to have to go looking at them. I accept it was an experiment to some degree. Going forward, we should not be afraid of that and we should look at housing for all sites, but for everybody as well, for our own people and for whoever else needs the housing. I would hope that the benefit would be more widely spread than just the Ukrainian end use.