EBS and Bank of Ireland are both approved lenders under the Affordable Housing Initiative but although it has been hugely successful for the buyers who have taken part, there is disappointment that it has been so slow to take off.

According to Dara Deering, head of mortgages at the EBS, more local authorities need to sign up to take part in the scheme if it is to realise its full potential.

"With 12,0000 additional homes due to be allocated across all local authorities in the next two years, this scheme presents a great opportunity for people who have been previously locked out of the market, " says Deering.

"But the affordable housing initiative will only really gain momentum as more local authorities sign up to the security agreements with the two approved lenders in the market as as they allocate housing in their areas."

So far, only 16 local authorities have joined the scheme. The average pro"le of the EBS borrower, says Deering, has been a single person earning between 30,000 and 56,000 a year, with most people working in the public sector as teachers, gardai or nurses. They have also had applications from people working in midmanagement in the private sector.

Deering says that there are a lot of misconceptions about affordable housing schemes . . . the biggest being that this is social housing and so people automatically tend to rule themselves out from being eligible.

"We need to address the confusion in the public's mind that affordable housing and social housing are one and the same. This is not the case. Affordable housing is actually private housing made available through the local authorities which is being bought at an affordable price.

"There is a huge opportunity to generate further demand for these homes if more people were aware of what they are entitled to under the scheme."

The need for wider information about people's eligibility under the scheme is reinforced by the publication of the latest house price index by the ESRI and PermanentTSB.

The monthly index shows that, once again, house prices rose strongly, increasing by 1.2% in January and bringing the year-on-year growth to 10.2%.

All house types went up:

the cost of houses outside Dublin went up by 1.5%;

those in the commuter counties rose sharply by 1.9%, while those in Dublin went up by 1.2%.

First-time-buyer homes rose by 0.7%, a slight slowdown in the surge caused by the changes in stamp duty early in 2005, but the average price now paid by a "rst-time buyer has passed the quarter of a million mark and is now 251,281.

The average price paid for a house nationally was 281,197, while the average price in the capital was 373,096.