Ms Caroline Timmons:

Yes, the Deputy is right. We are in the company of two of the really high achievers in terms of house vacancy. To address the issue, Ms O'Connor and her team have been organising a series of workshops with the best in the business over the past year for the vacant homes officers. They have been disseminating best practice over the last year and have been very involved in bringing forward things like the CPO programme which takes a person through exactly how to do it. We have been taking from the people who know how to do it and making sure that everybody else gets the information. We are now seeing the network of vacant homes officers being able to come together very positively because they know who to call to ask a question and they know how other people are doing things. That is something that the team have worked on very successfully together with the leaders in the field.

Regarding www.vacanthomes.ie, the Deputy might remember that was a shared service type website that Mayo County Council had brought forward at the time. In fairness the council does a lot of work in vacancy and it is very active in the space. I am not sure what the scheduling is but that data is pushed out to all of the local authorities. What I think was missing from the equation was a vacant homes officer to push it on to a particular programme. We have now set the new CPO activation programme which has a target for each local authority that the Deputy referred to. There is a target for each local authority both for activation and for CPO. That is the way to move it forward. They can use the data from that website or from their derelict site register or from their survey, put it all together and then set that number of properties in their activation list. That is their go-to list for the year. The list makes them aware of what they are going to do and how they are going to do it. This has been a really important piece that the Department has been helping to resource and the CCMA has been helping with training. That is how we are tackling the issue.