Cillian Woods

I mean, it's hard to... If it's...

If you look at the way developers think about it, so somewhere between what they say and the opposition is probably true, is they say the building costs for apartments are so high, there's no money, there's no margin to be made.

And all this does is actually just gets them on site to make that minimum margin, which is a couple of percent.

So it is a subsidy really to the developers.

It doesn't really matter whether you say it's them or the people getting it at the end.

The developer collects that 120 grand.

whether they're actually getting much profit off that, those building apartments, is another thing because building apartments is a terribly tricky business.

They also might have to carry the cost of not being able to sell some of the apartments.

A three-bed, even coming through this scheme, could be quite expensive and people who are buying three-bed apartments will probably be, or in that range, will probably be able to afford a three-bed or a nicer house or a bigger house in a better location.

So three-bed apartments aren't necessarily the thing that people want to buy.

So there's some risk in assuming... Well, unless you're a family.

Yeah, that's what people, maybe more likely to buy a house for the price that you would have to buy an apartment through Creecona in a better location, because these Creecona apartments might necessarily be in central Dublin or central Cork.

They could be still in the suburbs, which is the idea of apartment living is you're sacrificing some space for a better location.

Yeah.

The apartments could be in those particular sites which I'm not exactly familiar with could be locked up in that they would need to be apartments and they couldn't be built for homes because the density of the site might dictate that they have to be apartments and that this is a wing of the development that couldn't be built.

So

In the way Creecon, in that way, could be useful in helping developers to complete sites that would be, maybe there would be a business case for actually doing the 100 homes as part of the scheme, but the 50 apartments don't work.

I mean, when you've got the likes of Cairn and Glenveig having to get subsidies to build apartments, it's not a great sign, is it, that some of these big builders can't make it square with the size of their businesses, that they can only make apartments work through state subsidies.

I think that leaves the sector in a very tricky position in a way, I liken it to the hospitality sector constantly arguing for a VAT cut or the maintaining of the VAT cut or if it goes up, the VAT to go back down to 9%.

The building sector, the residential building sector,