Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

No, that is not what I am saying. When the voids programme was initiated, it was a specific intervention to address long-term vacancy in local authority stock and it did a very good job. I have to say that it was a good programme. What has happened over a number of years as local authorities have cleared out their long-term vacancy stock, is that funding from the voids programme has been used for a different purpose. I have no problem with that. If a local authority needs that extra €40,000, that is great but they are not voids. Ms Timmons's choice of language is unfair. The local authorities are telling the Department what money they applied for under its scheme. The Department's scheme decides that they are voids. What I am saying is that a very large portion of those are not voids as per the original definition but are casual re-lets. It is a standard local authority property that was occupied, a tenant dies or moves out and an additional amount of money is required to bring it quickly back into use. It would be good if the Department was able to disaggregate that and show that its intervention is helping local authorities but these properties are not voids as per the original definition. This is not my definition. It is the definition preceding Ms Timmons's involvement in the Department. Could the Department look at that because it gives a misleading impression around that?

Ms Timmons mentioned a target for Dublin city and said that Dublin has a low rate of vacancy. That is not the case. Its percentage at a county-wide level versus other counties might be lower but Dublin city has an exceptionally high rate of vacancy. The numbers of vacant properties are higher. You could have an area where the level of vacancy might be proportionately lower than in another local authority but because the number of properties in that local authority area are much greater, it is much higher. Using the Dublin county percentage as a way of targeting the number of vacant properties to be brought into use in Dublin city is misleading because Fingal, South Dublin and Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown, where I am, have a much lower rate of vacancy than Dublin city, where Senator Fitzpatrick is. The way in which the Department looks at those targets needs to be based more on where vacancy is concentrated and that is not at a county level. It might not even be at a local authority level. It might be within LEAs. That is what Waterford has done very successfully. It has identified those areas. I urge the Department to be more nuanced. Regarding the idea that Dublin only has four CPOs, I would hazard a guess that there are thousands of vacant properties within the Dublin city and county boundaries and the idea that the target of four CPOs is one for the Dublin folks to argue about rather than those of us in the county does not seem a credible way of estimating what is a reasonable return from individual local authorities.

Cork city would be the same. Even in some of the other counties, it is the towns or some of the villages where the concentration is rather than in the county.