Darragh O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Fianna Fail)
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It will be closer to 8,000 in total, if we go back to 2020, which was the year we came into office. This year we are providing an additional €15 million in this Supplementary Estimate for this year's expenditure. Some of that is due to increased cost, but it is targeting additional homes to come back in. This year we targeted about 2,300 vacant dwellings to bring them back into use in our social housing stock. At this stage I project that we will bring back in between 2,550 and 2,600. That will require an additional €15 million, and we got that on the basis of specific submissions from certain local authorities, including the Chair's local authority in Wicklow, Dublin City Council and Longford County Council, as examples. Seven or eight local authorities made submissions to the Department seeking additional funding for stock they could bring back into use this year.

There is a variance with the voids and the cost in local authorities too. Some are doing very deep retrofits where we are looking at the average cost in one county of about €90,000 per home to bring voids back in. One could argue that significant changes are being made by bringing older homes back to an A2 rating. When that is done, it has to be balanced against the length the time the home is actually vacant before it is re-let. Something that is rightly discussed in this committee is how we make sure, when we are upgrading homes, some of which I have seen have been in bad shape, the re-letting times to get vacant homes back into use are short. I am estimating we will do about 2,550 to 2,600 voids this year, and the €15 million is provided for that today.