Mr. Keith Walsh:

I will try to address the first couple of questions and Ms Jean Kennedy might comment on the new houses and the pyrite. In terms of engagement with the Department of Finance, the most comprehensive engagement was as part of the Thornhill review which ran for a fair chunk of the early part of 2015. Aside from that, we have fairly regular engagement on topics. When parliamentary questions are asked we respond to them jointly. Beyond queries coming in and that sort of thing, we have not had any significant engagement since the Thornhill report.

In terms of the yield and the estimates, the Deputy is absolutely right that property prices have moved on a lot since the 2015 analysis done for the Thornhill report. We have not updated the analysis since then.

The reason I was highlighting this in my opening statement was to make the point that, just because there is an increase in property prices, this does not necessarily translate one-to-one into an increase in local property tax receipts because of the valuation banding system. A property can increase in value but stay within its valuation banding system. If a property worth €125,000 increased to €140,000, it would stay within the same local property tax, LPT, valuation banding. The Thornhill report indicated that, even though property prices have gone up by 26%, nearly half of all properties would not change valuation band, based on that analysis.