Mr. John McCarthy:

The land was purchased for the housing programme. Its value was the capacity it gave the local authorities to deliver housing units. It was not purchased for commercial purposes with a view to resale. All of the land involved is still available for social housing or other productive purposes.

We worked closely with the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform as part of this process. I suppose we were involved in full redemption. As the loans matured, we redeemed the loans. In that phase of the scheme, there were 47 sites, covering approximately 170 ha of land, and approximately €111 million of loans. We got a longer-term perspective on the housing capital programme from the multi-annual financial programme that was put in place in 2012. As we moved further on in time, it became clear that sufficient capital resources would not be available to enable us to continue the scheme in that format. We decided that maturing loans would be converted to standard annuity loans, in effect, with terms of up to 25 years. We decided we would recoup the payments on those loans. There were 26 sites, involving approximately €52 million in loans, under that second phase of the scheme. As those loans were not repaid - they were refinanced, in effect - we have an ongoing liability of approximately €2.7 million per annum in relation to them. We have since discontinued the scheme for financial reasons. Local authorities are engaging with the Housing Finance Agency on a bilateral basis on how they can best deal with those issues. The Government has committed to preparing a social housing strategy, to be finalised in the third quarter of this year. The important thing for us now is that we have asked the housing agency to do a land management strategy piece to accompany the social housing strategy. The land management strategy will enable us to take opportunities to match areas where we might envisage there will be a housing build programme with the stock of land that is available.