The housing picture that I was trying to give you of my hometown was an initiative of the federal and provincial governments about fifteen years ago. It was very helpful to small communities to have affordable housing, especially for seniors, so they built duplexes. However, it is very difficult to get people to move to the outskirts of a city now, as you said earlier, so these places remain vacant. The small towns have declined in population, so there is nobody to fill these.
We had talked at one time about even trying to get immigrants perhaps to settle when they were close to Saskatoon, and this was very discouraged. These units are now being sold off--and some of them are very, very nice units--for $2,500 or $3,000. People are moving them out of our community, when in fact what I was trying to say is that perhaps the provincial government could be encouraging people to have their first months in Canada in some of these communities that are close to the city, and encourage English as a second language classes perhaps out there in our schools.
There are all sorts of ideas out there to make use of our small communities as well, when we have housing that is vacant right now. There are some very well-furnished units, and they are on the outskirts of our communities. I don't know if all provinces did that, but our province had an aggressive movement, and we have a lot of them.
That is why I wonder where the federal government should be when it comes to these affordable housing initiatives. Perhaps the province has to have a little more in it, so they don't just sell these off when they feel there's no need. Because whatever does happen in our province.... The population is declining, and everybody is moving here, to Calgary.
I still wanted you to continue on with the Irish model that you indicated earlier. I think that was a very interesting concept, the ponying up of wages. Do you want to tell us a little more? Is there any more that you wanted to add about how you found Ireland?