Mr. Seán Moynihan:

With regard to people not being aware of what is available in the community, in some ways the community has changed, with services online and fewer of them delivered in the community. People like us are trying to reimagine the community by tapping into volunteer support. Our aim in the next few years is ultimately to increase to some 9,000 volunteers to support older people so those supports and that information is available on a one-to-one basis, and to leverage what already exists while campaigning or working with partners to get other services in place.

Housing with Support, which comes under Rebuilding Ireland, is one designated project to which we are the supplier. The Departments of Health, and Housing, Planning and Local Government have worked very hard, but it has taken three years to get to a point of agreement on how it will be built and the standards. The housing agencies are now trying to produce a report on a model that can be replicated.

As an approved housing body, we are one of the 16 agencies that are Housing Finance Agency-approved. The way it currently works is that we have to identify the site and purchase it, and there is a huge amount of investment and work to be done to get something across the line. Many people are working to smooth all of that but we still need more consolidation. While I am avoiding the word "bureaucracy" on purpose because there are many people who work very hard in this area and are doing their best, there certainly needs to be support for those individuals to push forward. This is why we come back to having demand-type numbers so we can look by area and say what are the needs for clusters of housing for older people per area. The Department of Education and Skills recently announced it has the statistics on the growth in the number of children, so it knows in advance to put schools in place. We have no such system in regard to the demand for housing and it is ultimately about reimagining the resources available and how we plan. The development in Dún Laoghaire that was just described sounds exactly like what we want for every housing estate. Regardless of who is the developer, whether it is public, private or an AHB, it should be built to represent the demographics of the area and allow people to age in their own community and move around the corner if they so choose.

On the age-friendly issue, money is always an issue but when we break it down by average build cost, it is probably €7,000 per unit.

If something has a life span of 40 years, and as proposed by Mr. Lynch, there are ways around finding that €7,000 per unit. In that case, when people look back they will realise we planned well, we looked to the future and we looked to the next generation of older people, as well as this generation, which we are trying to support.