Mr. Seamus Coffey:

Much of that is outside our mandate and looks at areas for which we do not have direct responsibility. There is a plethora of housing agencies and we have picked up another in the past week or two. They are supposed to look at this area. I am not familiar with employment levels in approved housing bodies. Our concern with housing, as mentioned in the discussion we had with Deputy Boyd Barrett, is the impact housing activity and construction has on the economy and whether there are resources to meet the activity demand that might emerge. The design of our housing system is for somebody else to address. We are concerned with the impact on economic activity, especially of new housing, and, given the tax-rich nature of private housing construction, the impact that can have on public finances. That is our primary sphere of interest.

I will have to put on a completely personal hat in addressing vacant housing because it is not something that IFAC looks at. I am at a loss to say why there is vacant housing in urban centres and city centre locations, given the rent increases we have seen in recent years. If someone has a property and owns it, I cannot understand why he or she would leave it sitting idle when there are substantial rents to be collected. I am not sure what are the costs or hindrances to prevent those from being used or why one would just sit on an asset when substantial rents could be had. It seems contradictory. An issue with vacant housing in rural areas is that people prefer large houses outside the town and that is what has happened over a 20 to 30-year period. The centres of rural towns have become depopulated as people have moved to newer, bigger houses on bigger sites on the outskirts of the town. That is what people have chosen. I do not know if we can reverse that. With regard to the system itself, whether it can be sped up and whether lump sums should be given to local authorities to engage in activities, that is something for somebody else to decide.