James Lawless (Kildare North, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Absolutely, I will share with Deputy Flaherty. I thank the Chair.

I thank the Minister. The scheme is a going down well. I was delighted to welcome it when it was announced a while back. I have interacted with it, largely with Kildare County Council but also with some other local authorities around me as well. My first impression of it was that it was a great scheme in theory. I did not have a sense that local authorities, certainly in the early stages, were fully engaged or had got to grips with it and I wondered to what extent it was embedded within local authorities and to what extent the local authorities have a dedicated officer within the housing section who is on the ground and working with people, public representatives and individuals to make it work.

I will ask rapid-fire questions. Deputy O'Callaghan might have raised the same question. A question that comes up a lot that I get is, does a landlord or property owner need to put the property on the open market before he or she can engage in the tenant in situscheme or can he or she come through a public representative or to the local authority directly and state that he or she has a property and ask to sign it over to the local authority and for the local authority take it over from there? I get mixed answers to that, or mixed messages, depending on who I ask across local authorities.