Professor Rob Kitchin:

In a general sense, one could get The Irish Timesand find lots of issues around this and I am sure we could go back through various hearings and find various examples of poor practice in planning decision-making. There are big risks and potential liabilities, as Ms Hegarty said earlier. The Chairman has me worried about naming other examples but a lot of money was lost in the Docklands on certain sites and State agencies were investors in sites when the crash happened. A lot of money was lost by State agencies. There are potentially significant liabilities. In that case, hundreds of millions of euro were lost, which was not an insignificant amount. There may be issues also regarding lobbying, insider deals, financial irregularities and so on. To be outside any kind of lack of transparency would create possible accountability issues downstream. I would be very cautious about that.

Reference was made to ownership of land. There are models in Europe where the land does not leave public ownership. In the Netherlands, for example, land is leased and it does not leave the state's control. There are such models, which may also serve to reduce development costs because the land price is not included in the development costs.