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

This is very important. That is for Dublin county, and it has a whole set of newer suburbs with low vacancy rates, and then a historic city which has very high vacancy rates. Using the percentage for the county, as opposed to the number within the local authority area, would not be my initial point.

The second point is that Dublin city does not have pockets. We only have to walk through the city centre to see there is a phenomenal number. The census used to have about 40,000 vacant properties in Dublin city, not in the county. With GeoDirectory, it used to work out at about half that, at around 20,000. I do not believe there are 20,000 vacant properties in Dublin city that we can get for residential use, but even if it was half that again, that is 10,000. I imagine that the folks in Dublin city would be pretty disappointed with such a low level of ambition, if the idea is that we have an activation rate of 150. I appreciate that the survey has been only initiated, but at some point we need a much clearer number of the actual number of properties in each local authority area and each local electoral area, and more ambitious targets. On the basis of the figures the witnesses have given us, in the past four years, only about 250 vacant and derelict properties have been brought into active use State-wide. It has not been escalating each year. It was quite high in 2019, and in 2020 and 2021 it fell because of Covid, and it is now moving back to 2019 levels. That is a pretty low rate of return, even if we take a conservative estimate, using the local property tax, LPT, returns of 57,000 vacancies, or even if it is only half that. I urge that we would look at the way those targets are set.

I would also urge that the Department or the committee would put the schemes in some kind of tabular form on their websites so that the local authorities and the Department could track them. If it is good news, that is great, we will compliment everybody. If it is not good news, then at least we will know where the progress is or is not being made.