Mr. Niall Cussen:

The point I might add to that is that there might have been a sense in council chambers around the numbers being wrong, but what we see all the time is that the real issue is increasing output and delivery of housing even in the locations we have identified. The Deputy will be familiar in his area of Offaly of the significant gap between even what was in what might have been the flawed or capped development plan and, in many cases, the actual delivery of housing, which was perhaps a third, not even half, of what was in the core strategy of the relevant development plan. That does not speak to a lack of zoned land. It is because of issues around viability, the capability of housing providers and developers to mobilise lands and so on and issues around infrastructure. To some extent, many of these questions and debates were a little bit academic, around whether the population targets should be increased. The issue was that we were struggling to get output off the floor and that is still the case in large parts of the country, particularly in regional and rural Ireland.