Mr. Patrick Sweetman:

A fair number of points were made. With regard to Deputy Coppinger's point, I did not actually make any suggestion that local authorities had enough lands. Somebody else made that suggestion. What I was saying was that for local authorities to access the additional lands they require, it would be far cheaper, much more efficient and much quicker for them to buy them on the open market rather than using a CPO procedure, which would be slower and ultimately much more expensive.

I did not quite address Deputy O'Rourke's question on whether one could use a CPO to acquire land at a discounted price. That is probably the essence of what he was asking.

There has been discussion previously concerning constitutional issues and what is the actual constitutional position. We heard it earlier again today with reference to the Kenny report. Many other commentators have always suggested that if one is seeking to take in land at less than the current open market value, that is a constitutional issue. I cannot really put that one much further.

As regards the Chairman's comment on a carrot-and-stick approach, there is the vacant land tax which has just been brought in for people hoarding land or holding on to land and not bringing it forward to the market. That has been dealt with but on the question of limited resources, I would argue that in terms of pure maths or sums, by bringing in incentives which would encourage more building and encourage more people to be able to acquire property, that will pay for itself. Economically, it will be a much better way of going about it.

In that context, I might take Deputy Catherine Byrne's comment on building for everybody. The difficulty there is that there is a finite resource and if one is going to build for everybody, it would be an extraordinarily expensive process to try to do that. It would also be a real challenge trying to co-ordinate, through some central process, that 20,000 to 30,000 units were built by a single entity centrally every year. There would be real difficulties with that and the better way to go about it is the dual approach of local authorities being financed and encouraged to build and provide housing, and the private sector also playing its part.

I was going to take Deputy Coppinger's last point next, but I have lost it. I think the point was that not all are willing sellers. No, of course, not everybody is a willing seller. However, I would say that there are enough willing sellers if there was the resource. I am not conscious that any local authority or Government agency has actually sought to acquire any of these land banks, or has appointed agents with a view to acquiring them. They could of course have bought them at the same competitive rates had they wished to do so. We now have a crisis which must be addressed. They need to be resourced to do that and if the local authorities or State agency, whichever way it goes, are resourced to buy land, the land will be available.