Paul Donnelly (Dublin West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

There are a couple of issues I would like to address. One relates to AHBs. We have a lot of experience in my constituency with AHBs. They are buying and building vast numbers of homes. We have seen how it has worked in the area. It is a really good suggestion. I like the idea that it is a community basis coming from the islands themselves because they are the ones who understand and acknowledge what the difficulties and challenges are.

One of the things we need to look at is new technologies when we talk about new homes. We need to look at the traditional house, be it block-built or otherwise. We talked earlier of the difficulty with getting construction workers onto the island and the expense involved. A lot of the new technologies we have looked at involve building off site in factories. They do not need a highly skilled set of construction workers on site and they can be moved and constructed rapidly. I visited one such site recently that is going up in the next few months. It will take three months for a block of six apartments to be built. It is all built off site and it will take three months to install it. That is something that really needs to be looked at.

Another very important issue is cost rental and affordable rental. If we put the cost of renting onto the individual, then it becomes unaffordable. There is no point in doing that. We must make homes affordable for people. We must also look at the public housing aspect of it as well, which is extremely important, so that people who cannot and will never be able to afford to get a mortgage, even on an affordable scheme, are given an opportunity to live on the islands as well.

Have we ever looked at underoccupied houses? In my constituency the council will look at cases where a family in a three- or four-bedroom home have grown up and moved out and the property is underoccupied. There is an opportunity in the planning legislation to look at allowing somebody to build a home that would release a bigger home so that a family could move into it. We need something like that. There are an awful lot of people who would like to move from a big home because of the cost of running a three- or four-bedroom house, as opposed to a one-bedroom house, which would suit their current needs.

In terms of planning, second homes and holiday lets, do we know exactly how many holiday lets there are, on average, as a proportion of the overall number of houses on this island? Again, that has an impact. Reference was made to security of tenure for those who are currently letting. I could be wrong, but my understanding is that there are four conditions that allow a person to get a property back from a renter. I did not know a holiday let was one of those. Could the witnesses elaborate on that?