My question is for the Tánaiste and the Minister for Rural and Community Development, Deputy Ring. A number of years ago, the Government launched the repair and lease scheme to allow properties on high streets to be leased out to social housing tenants. There does not seem to be a proper level of take-up in respect of the scheme. I see it when driving through villages at home in east Cork. There are still many properties in respect of which I thought landlords and owners would have applied to the scheme. Will the Minister comment on this? Could we relax the rules of scheme a bit or introduce an alternative scheme? The village and town renewal scheme was in place approximately 15 years ago. We need to do something in order to have these properties developed. We have ended up with villages and towns affected by the doughnut effect whereby main streets and side streets are empty and there is ribbon development along the sides roads. How can we increase uptake in respect of the scheme?

The repair and lease scheme comes under the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government. It was introduced as a way to get private housing stock back into use by making it available for social housing. The initial take-up was not very successful so we reviewed and reformed the scheme to make it easier for landlords to access it. There has been an improvement in the level of take-up since then but many people who approached local authorities about the repair and lease scheme have gone into the buy and renew scheme instead. The local authorities have taken the houses from them, renewed the houses themselves and brought them back in as part of the social housing stock. We have also worked on above-the-shop living. People no longer require planning permission if they want to convert areas above shops into homes. That is specifically targeted at getting life and vibrancy back into towns and villages because that is a very important part of what we are trying to do. Between the urban fund and the rural regeneration fund, there is €3 billion for towns and villages to do precisely the kind of thing the Deputy wants to do, namely, ensure that we do not have a doughnut effect in some of our towns and villages.