Mr. John O'Sullivan:

In any case, I take the point the Deputy is making. In regard to ARVs and amalgamations, that is a matter for the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government, not the Valuation Office.

The Deputy asked about the central thrust behind the Valuation (Amendment) (No. 2) Bill 2012. It is essentially a series of measures to accelerate the revaluation programme and thus allow us to complete it more quickly across the country. An important aspect of the 2001 legislation is its provision that once a first valuation is completed, a rolling process then kicks in whereby it must be redone not less than five years and not more than ten years thereafter. The difficulty at the moment is that after such a long period of time, a range of anomalies is emerging in the first revaluation. The principle under the new legislation is that once the first assessment is done and the more modern valuations are in situ, the revaluation exercise will be conducted on a repetitive basis far more quickly thereafter and we will be able to pick up on economic movements that have happened and so on. That is the thrust of the 2012 Bill.