Mr. Paddy Mahon:

I will address some of these questions and ask Mr. Brannigan to deal with the others. We have made good progress on the affordable scheme. Perhaps the word "hopeful" is a bit soft. We are confident that we will have a positive outcome very soon. We have had a number of very positive meetings with the Department in recent months. The most recent was last Friday, and there was another on Thursday. We believe there is momentum and we will be looking for expressions of interest from the public in the near future. As I said to Deputy Flaherty, we are not there yet but I believe we are almost there.

The retrofit scheme is very welcome. Because of the just transition process in the midlands and the midland regional transition team, Longford was one of the counties allocated funding ahead of the rest of the country. It is now two years later and we are part of the national retrofit programme. It was always understood and expected to be 100% funded. The funding originally came from the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications. We have completed approximately 70 houses and we are carrying €10,000 or €11,000 per house. To me this is not 100% funded. It is something on which we have engaged with the Department and we will continue to do so. If a scheme is 100% funded my understanding is that it should be fully recouped. As I said in my submission we recoup most of it. The residents in the houses are very happy with the final outcome of the retrofitting programme. It is very positive. It is positive because we reduce emissions, we are more energy efficient and it is a better quality of home for the residents. We have a significant number of houses to deliver. The sector has to deliver 35,000 houses between now and 2030. We need to have confidence in the security of the funding. If we are carrying €10,000 or €11,000 per house it impacts on our ability to do other work on houses in terms of planned maintenance.

Deputy O'Callaghan mentioned vacancies earlier. This is a significant concern for us. As Mr. Brannigan pointed out, we have put in place, and intend to put in place, a number of actions to address it. We are happy that at the end of last year we had the highest level of social housing vacancy in the sector. Mr. Brannigan and I will be sitting down with our team to manage this on a monthly basis, to drive down the level of vacancy, introduce further efficiencies to make sure our houses are vacant for as little time as possible and to ensure that residents can be in those houses and live in good quality accommodation. It is something we take very seriously and intend to address as a matter of urgency. I will ask Mr. Brannigan to deal with the issue of capacity in Edgeworthstown and Ballymahon.