Mr. David Silke:

Let me explain the process the Housing Agency went through. The Housing Agency's first port of call was to look at the available data. The Deputy asked whether the available data were accurate. They are probably less accurate than the data the Residential Tenancies Board Ireland, RTB, has now but they were the best available data at the time. There were two main sources of data. One was the third quarter of 2016 report of daft.ie which indicated that rents in County Louth were just over €900 at that time. We also looked at the available data from the Residential Tenancies Board on average rents. This did not weight for differences in terms of the number of bedrooms and so on, that Ms. Carroll mentioned earlier, and its figures indicated that rents were in the region of just over €800.