Mr. Kieran Kehoe:

It is being picked up. A survey is now ongoing through our vacant homes office. As local authorities working for our cities, towns and rural areas, we are very aware of our own areas. Decisions are made in respect of the best mechanism to deal with the issue. Different local authorities have taken different approaches. Sometimes it comes down to resources. I do not mean people. To go back to the discussion with Deputy McNamara, I was previously involved in a small local authority. Prior to the provision of the funding that is now available, if such an authority went down the derelict sites route and decided to compulsorily acquire ten properties at €150,000 each, that was €1.5 million onto its book. It had to carry that burden. Those decisions have to be made at senior level. Sometimes it is not possible to recoup the levy that is imposed on sites on the register. Our experience is that most of the properties that are in a bad state have no or very poor title and it is a challenge to even find the owner. The levy is not being paid and that is an administrative process for no return. We in Waterford focused on getting to the end product through a quicker mechanism, such as by using repair and lease or the other mechanisms that are available. Under the second call of the urban regeneration and development fund, almost €30 million is being directed into the city centre. It is about getting at those difficult properties, some of which are old or protected. There are vast properties that the private sector will not go near because of the cost of refurbishment and there is the scale of intervention that is needed as well. There are all these different scales. We all see the obvious properties that are somewhat easy to acquire and flip but there are bigger interventions. Sites are another challenge. This approach will attract and very strongly go after properties such as derelict old industrial units or whatever that could produce hundreds of units.