Eoghan Murphy (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Senator for her follow-up remarks. I hope the information I provided is useful in terms of actual numbers. The reason we can provide that is that we have vacant home action plans for, and vacant home officers in, each of the local authorities. As I said in my initial response, Mayo was involved in this pilot programme. When we get high level numbers around vacancy - we see reports from the Central Statistics Office, CSO, and from GeoDirectory - and what we have seen when we have gone in to do the work is that the true level of vacancy has been overstated because of what was counted. In the case of the CSO, it counts summer homes and houses that are for sale or for rent. These types of homes do not speak to the type of vacancy that we are talking about.

In the six-month period of that survey, there was a series of inspections of each property to make sure they were still vacant in that period. That was a visual inspection of more than 1,000 properties. Not every property was inspected. It would not have included all the homes the Senator might see in her constituency.