Mr. Stephen Garvey:

Yes. We have a team that liaises with Uisce Éireann and the EPA. We apply for planning permission, we get the permission and then we get the EPA licence. It is challenging but it can be done. We are doing it on smaller schemes of about 200 units. For 40 and 50 units, it is probably achievable. The biggest thing is the discharge, access to rivers and things like that. That can be a challenge sometimes.

Density is a key point. At 50 units a hectare, we can predominantly achieve all own-door housing now with the new compact growth guidelines. One can see the benefits in that of delivering more affordable housing because own-door housing is a lot less expensive to deliver than apartments. When we get to 100 or 150 units a hectare, which is the next step, we are into apartments at that density level. There is nothing else you can deliver and you are at a medium density. You are at a storey level of around five to six. Once you reach five or six storeys, you go into different fire regulations. If you go above six, you might as well head all the way to 25 because the cost is so prohibitive. There is a kind of band that we can only operate in. The point I was making earlier is because choice has been reduced so much and under the new guidelines the Minister introduced, if you take 100 units per hectare, you can now limit the quantity of apartments down to 30% or 40% of the site and open up more own-door housing. The other concept we had in this country, except we removed it, would have benefited places like Limerick, namely, co-living, which can help achieve better densities. You can reduce the quantity of apartments you have to deliver. Apartments are prohibitive no matter what in terms of the cost to deliver them and the quantity of capital required for the development as well as the buyer who is there to buy them. We can make apartments with institutional investors that were working in Dublin three years ago. They were not working in Limerick, Galway or Cork.