Dr. Philip Crowe:

That is an excellent question because what is fascinating is that certain organisations like Revenue and the Land Development Agency have those legislative powers to ask certain organisations to share their data and the organisations still do not. Therefore, there is a much more complex picture as to why we do not have access to certain data sets. It is definitely possible, if we could deal with those data-sharing issues, to have pretty accurate figures. The most accurate figures of vacancy in this country were done about six or seven years ago with the collaborative town centre health check, which was boots on the ground. They came up with figures. By way of example, Dundalk town centre had 24% vacancy at ground floor and possibly 80% at upper floors. We do not know across the country at this moment what the figures are. Other countries do. There are methods of doing this. We are just not there.

Somebody else may want to take the question on the derelict property tax. If we do not have good data, how will we manage that? It would be very interesting to hear from Revenue, which is now going to have to look after this, how it feels about the data. Not being able to get reliable data is what has crippled the vacant homes tax.