Mr. Patrick Davitt:

Rights of way are the first thing. Depending on where the house is located in the particular farmyard, a right of way to that house is the biggest thing. It is one of the main bogeys from a bank point of view when financing these properties. If you want to get at the property, you must be able to have roadway to get there. It cannot be a shared roadway as the banks do not like them. That is one of the first things. The second thing is access to farms from these buildings, whether they are far away from the farm buildings or not. The third thing is, we do not want to sell these properties to people who will wake on a Saturday morning after working all day in Dublin or another city, find somebody is putting slurry out next door and immediately think they should not have bought the property. We need to have particular clients, particular people, to buy these properties who are aware of what goes on in the country. If we are able to put all those things together we will be in a situation where many of those properties can be brought back into use.

Capital gains are important in this situation. Many of these farms were handed down to people when they were very young. They could have come down to them from their grandfather or father and been valued at very little at the time. The capital gains problems here are going to be much more than they are with many other people. If that was sorted out to some degree, the farming organisations could play a huge role in trying to make these people see the best thing is to sell their house or do it up. They could move some of their older people into these houses and have young people in the main farmhouse, or something to that effect. That is housing people who would otherwise be going out there looking for a house. Those three things are the most important with respect to the farmhouses of today.