Carol Tallon

And I'll give you a very specific reason as to why.

Sligo bid, actually recently Sligo, as you may know, is often cited as the part of the town in Ireland with the highest level of commercial vacancy.

And the local businesses and stakeholders came together and said, this just doesn't make sense.

It doesn't reflect what we're seeing on the ground.

So they actually appointed somebody to physically walk to each of the premises that was showing up on Geodirectory.

And in fact, what they discovered was that the data being fed in was based on address points from decades ago.

So actually, where you might have had two families living in an area that was now a commercial building with storage overhead was actually counting as three addresses.

So it was completely distorting our dereliction figures.

And that simple exercise manually undertaken by Sligo BID shows that actually, and this is not a direct criticism of Geodirectory, it's more...

criticism of us as a nation and how we've handled data.

But it also means that we need to be very careful in our data that, one, we are accurately assessing what's going on on the ground.

But the second thing is, where a genuine level of dereliction and vacancy is identified, we have to ask why.

Why is it so?

Is it down to the viability of bringing that building back into a living condition that will comply with current building regulations?

And there's a really interesting study, a piece of research underway being conducted by UCD at the moment.

And it's been led by the Irish Green Building Council with support from the housing department and Construct Innovate.

And they've essentially posed the question to go from vacant to viable.

are building regulations a stumbling block?

Are they causing challenges?

And some of the early research coming out of that is really interesting because actually what we realised was that even industry, property owners, developers, investors, there was some common misunderstandings about what it takes for a place to be viable.