Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

It is a great day for solicitors. Let us say that a local authority bought land a few years ago but did not use the site. Solicitors on both sides got paid for conveyancing in order to transfer the land to the Housing Agency. Now the Housing Agency is going to transfer to the land development agency and will pay for the conveyancing again. We have about three sets of conveyancing happening here, with up to six solicitors involved, all for the one parcel of land. Title is being moved from the local authority to the Housing Agency and then from the Housing Agency to the land development agency. It is possible that the legal fees at the end of this process will be more per acre than the cost of the actual site. Has anyone thought about that? It seems grossly inefficient. Why do we need another State agency? Why can the Housing Agency not be beefed up? Perhaps it is a policy matter but we must ask why every time there is a problem the answer seems to be to establish a new agency. Here we go again. The Housing Agency is relatively new. I was here a few years ago when the land aggregation group, or whatever it was called, was in place. That agency is gone now and the Housing Agency is in place but we are still talking about the same fields in all of these places throughout the country. The Housing Agency will be gone in a few years. There will be someone else at a future meeting of the Committee of Public Accounts looking at the same field owned by a new State organisation. It is the same field the entire time. This is great news for solicitors in any event . I am not asking our guests to respond but I hope they understand the point I am making. I am sensing a shrugging of the shoulders here. I would prefer to see a greater effort going into building houses rather than into transferring title from one body to another. That point flows out of the chart showing sites in the various local authority areas.

Who manages the land that is under the stewardship of the Housing Agency in all of the different counties? Let us say it has 20 acres in a particular local authority area and 20 acres in another. Does the farmer next door use that land to graze his cattle? What happens with all of those sites? The agency has 2 ha here, 3 ha there and so on. What is happening with that land? Money was spent when the local authorities bought the land initially. When the Housing Agency was taking it over, contractors were sent out to fence off every one of the fields. It will probably have to be re-fenced. Who manages the sites? How many sites does the agency have in its ownership around the country? How are the sites managed?