Kieran O'Donnell (Limerick City, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputies Murnane O'Connor and McAuliffe. We will certainly take up that question about the URDF funding on Barrack Street. We very much want to see the centres of places like Carlow coming back into use for people to live in.

By way of being of assistance to the Deputies, we can look at 2023 itself and getting to that plan-led maintenance approach. Taking Carlow, Deputy Murnane O'Connor is correct that 33 units were brought back into use. The overall allocation there was €732,000. That was a large additional allocation. Initially it was €430,000 and then there was an additional €300,000, which is a significant upturn. That is an average cost of €22,000 per unit. If we look at Dublin city, there was an overall allocation of €11.3 million. The initial allocation was €5.76 and that was doubled. Some 499 units came back into use at roughly the same cost per unit of €22,000. I will go through the other areas we are dealing with here. Clare has 54 units that got a total of approximately €10.5 million. Cork city has 130 units that got an allocation of €2.56 million. Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown got €937,000 and brought 71 units back into use at a cost of €13,000 per unit. Limerick has 73 units coming back in for roughly €2 million. Longford has 54 units at a cost of €1.958 million with a very high per unit cost of about €36,000 per unit. South Dublin has 153 units with an allocation of €2.5 million at approximately €16,000 per unit. Tipperary has 100 units for a €2.428 million allocation at a cost of approximately €24,000 per unit. The average was€18,000 per unit. We want stock coming back into use. We accept the point about high value. We want to get to a place where voids are coming back into use as quickly as possible.

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