Mr. John O'Mahony:

It was from the uplift in the value. At the time, it was port industrial lands. With the uplift to mixed use and residential, the difference was brokered to borrow to build the metro.

In terms of the non-commercial nature, I know this is like a poison but when it was first set up, the Dublin Docklands Development Authority, DDDA, was a very effective and efficient organisation. It did what it said on the tin. It remediated land, did public private partnerships with the private sector and delivered social housing in an effective and efficient way, rolling it out incrementally so that we did not end up with sporadic development. Given the way it was structured after that, we have to look carefully at how it lost the run of itself. In its initial format, however, the DDDA worked very efficiently.

I agree with the Society of Chartered Surveyors of Ireland on affordability. Cost model is one of the best models to be used to roll out proper affordable and social housing. We support making CPO powers available, if only as a deterrent. They are unlikely to be used but in certain instances it may be necessary to use them.

There should definitely be flexibility in the percentages of social and affordable housing. People forget that site location has a major impact on value. People also forget that well over half of the population fall into the social and affordable category. In some instances, the entire site should probably be used for affordable housing and developed out in that way, whereas in other sites where there may be large value uplift, passing that on would have to be very carefully considered. It might be better to use the uplift in value there to subsidise other sites elsewhere.

In terms of how to get small builders involved, the LDA appears to be structured to do that in that it can license out in smaller packages. In the way it has developed as a designer, we normally design in phased development. On phased development, there is a very good model in Germany which breaks up plots. Instead of having what I would describe as mono-tenure or mono-typology on each plot, within each plot of land there is a social component, an affordable component and a private component. This may amount to only 50 or 60 units. By delivering that type of a model of usage, one gets diverse tenancy and architecture on sites. One also brings in so many different typologies of development, whether co-operative, social or affordable. The LDA is an ideal organisation to start looking at how we might do that.