Mr. Eddie Punch:

As the previous speakers stated, not many people will want to sell the property, especially if it is located somewhere in the middle of the farm. However, there may be some cases in which it is on the edge of the farm and it may be sold as a proposition to pay for the new milking shed or slatted house. There are examples of this because people are borrowing a lot of money for these projects. If they can alleviate the cost by selling something out of the edge of the farm, in such cases it might be relevant. In general, as I said earlier, the issue is the relationship between finance, making the repayments and the taxation treatment of same. There are different scenarios. In some cases we are talking about refurbishing a derelict property to rent it out. In some cases we are talking about farm families refurbishing properties for their sons or daughters. In the end it does not really matter what the ownership model is. They are all homes. The question is how we ensure we have a financial proposition that works for everyone. If we do not have the finance right and reasonable taxation treatment, it will not happen and the opportunity will have been missed. The real potential scenario is that there may well be someone farming at home who will get planning permission to build a new house on the farm because they have a right to do that if they are farming. There are difficulties and every county is different.

The potential here, in my view, is that there are second and third members of the family who have to be catered for in the overall inheritance settlement and who could very much benefit from renovating a derelict property on the family farm. In that scenario, as the Senator noted, they could commute from the farm to work in one of the cities or towns rather than trying to buy or compete for rental property in the town. In the end, every house that is renovated is of some benefit, direct or indirect, not just to the farm family in question but given the fact another house is freed up somewhere else.

We have to go back to the key issues here. A €70,000 grant sounds great but how do we turn this into reality in terms of finance as well as in terms of planning permission and bureaucracy?