Mr. John O'Mahony:

Relative to the size of the country, 10,000 is not a large figure. I would have thought there was an opportunity for the LDA to look nationwide at how to kill that as the most important element. That is my personal view. In a country as wealthy as Ireland, I am still quite shocked that we have not managed to solve that problem.

Regarding the nature of our communities and what we are putting into our developments, 80% of our housing stock is family houses and families make up 38% of the population. We have a significant oversupply of family housing and there is significant re-balancing to be done to create more balanced communities. The old model seemed to be about putting in three and four-bedroom houses and not matching them to the actual community base. Nowadays, we should be capable of being much more forensic about what goes on to each site from a local point of view so there should be a percentage of housing for older people and a percentage of first-time starter homes in order that people can live their entire lives in one community. We need to be more forensic about how we design and lay out our estates.

I have a question at which the committee might look. When the LDA was first promoted - when the first document came out identifying what the LDA would do - it had two functions. One was as a land development agency to take public land and develop it efficiently, while the other seemed to be really interesting. It was to follow a Dutch and German model whereby the agency would have the powers to designate areas as regeneration areas, purchase the land at that land value cost and develop it over time so that as the value went up, it was shared with the landowners. What was proposed was that the LDA would have a bank of land it would be able to work through in the event of a recession. It was also an element that might control the price of land. This has disappeared from any of the legislation I have seen.