Mr. Barry O'Leary:

In our main business with approved housing bodies, AHBs, they must qualify. They go through three-tiered assessments of their corporate structures, histories and future plans. It is rigorous, and 15 decent-sized AHBs have qualified. We have a secondary product that we call a tier 2 product. Anyone who is registered as an AHB and has signed up to the financial chapter that the housing regulator has brought into place can borrow up to €1.5 million from us on a reduced assessment basis. If an AHB gave us a set of accounts that proved it was solvent, we would consider giving it up to €1.5 million, but that would be the extent of our offering. This is targeted to spread the risk across the sector because there is quite a number of players therein.

Every AHB that approaches us must have a payment and availability agreement, PAA, in place. That is an arrangement with the local authority whereby the authority has nomination rights, in that it nominates people from its housing list to the houses. If all of that is in place and one has a solvent set of accounts, one will get approximately €1.5 million from us within approximately two weeks. I doubt whether one could get 25 units done for that, but the help is there on a small scale to encourage activity.