Mr. John O'Connor:

To put this in context, we have been working with NAMA, along with the Department, to get as many houses as possible from NAMA's loan portfolio for social housing. I have one clarification in terms of the numbers provided. The original number identified by NAMA was 6,951 properties. Of those, 1,843 were sold, so the actual number available from NAMA was 5,108 properties. It is important to clarify that. More than half of those properties that were available from NAMA will be provided as social housing. The properties that were deemed not suitable by local authorities included holiday homes and large houses in golf villages, but more importantly there were some very large developments in parts of the country, for example over 500 apartments in one local authority area in one development, which had already been partially allocated to local authorities under Part V provision. It was decided that 65 additional apartments was an appropriate number so as not to cause an over-concentration of social housing in that area. Similar scenarios played out in other locations. There were large concentrations of social housing and it was decided to only take some of those properties. In my opinion, the decisions taken by the local authorities as to what properties were suitable were reasonable.