Mr. Brendan Kenny:

If rapid build is used completion would be within 12 months. Oscar Traynor Road is a few months behind this, with a developer due to be selected in September. We are finalising a provisional framework plan for St. Michael's Estate covering all of the physical issues that have had to be dealt with. That will form the brief for the selection of a full design team, hopefully during July and August and certainly during the summer. It will mean we will have a full design team that will begin work immediately. There will be a strong element of consultation and I hope that by the spring of 2020 the developer will be submitting an application to An Bord Pleanála.

We are into the second stage of procurement in some of the other schemes advertised on the market in Cherry Orchard and Ballymun. We cannot give a real indication of the start date but we are making progress.

With regard to the cost, all of the indications and calculations we are doing on cost rental suggest it will work out at between €1,000 and €1,200 a month, which will be fine for a lot of people but certainly will not be affordable for others. Reducing that will mean an intervention. The non-service initiative may not be sufficient. Perhaps when it comes to borrowing we will borrow over 40 years rather than over 30 or 25 years.

It certainly needs some intervention to bring it down and we are working on that. We are not overly concerned that there is not currently a scheme there. We are doing a great deal of work on it and we hope to be able to make recommendations to Government on it in the coming months.

We are keen to see the income limit for eligibility to be a little higher. It might be a better mix in Inchicore or O'Devaney Gardens. We would like to see the threshold increased to about €80,000 or €90,000.

The article in TheIrish Times was clarification on issues on which the developers had expressed an interest. There is no way we will build homes in Ballymun from €160,000. It will be considerably higher than that. It is similar to the point raised earlier. It is the area of €250,000 or €270,000 where people qualify for the national home loan that we are trying to reach. That was just an indication of market values in the Ballymun and Cherry Orchard areas and taking 25% off them. Ultimately, the price will be very much dictated by the cost of construction.