Mr. Edmund Honohan:

There are quite a few questions there. With respect to children's rights, it seems there would be a problem in an individual case where a child wanted to claim a constitutional right to be protected against dislocation, if one likes. That is such an innovative approach and runs counter to the general understanding of the fundamental rights. It is an unexplored area. I do not know what we decided when we decided to pass the children's referendum. I do not know what we decided should be the benefits for children. I am sure this was not taken into account. That is why the outright purchase is the better solution. It is in a broader context of an overall solution for an overall problem.

There is no legal impediment to local authorities pressing on with home building. There seems to be a difficulty in the reality of doing it because of the problems sourcing skills and materials. We are going back to the old Marxist system where one had to count the bricks to make sure there were enough. If everybody starts building at the same time, putting in new water pipes, the new Luas line and so on, there will be a massive collision of demand and supply with respect to labour costs. That is a major difficulty. It is far cheaper for local authorities to be handed properties already built but which are empty or occupied by people who are about to be repossessed. Personally, I do not want to see a repeat of what happened in Ballymun. That is the difficulty for local authorities. They will ask how they can do this fast and the answer might occur of building what was in Ballymun again.

Unfortunately, that is the way local authorities dealt with it in the old days. They have a different view now but they might revert to what they did in the old days if the pressure is put on them to build quickly.

In any event, the point about the CPO proposal is that we have a window of opportunity to argue in court that there is a crisis and that the response of society to it is to seize all the property, the roofed space, that is available and use it to best advantage. Once one states that in broad terms, the minutiae or nitty-gritty of how it works and who benefits and does not benefit will be left to the Oireachtas. As to whether one can do that without paying full market value, the European Court would be loath to approve that unless it was in a situation where the value paid or the value of the property which was being acquired compulsorily was enhanced by some State action or some unexpected economic event. In that situation the value would be regarded as being something of a net value. At present, however, we have the reverse. The price they paid for these properties in the past three years is well below what they should have been paying to NAMA and IBRC. It is well below that, so we pay them back all of that money and wave goodbye to them.