Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

We agreed at the previous meeting that we would have a stand-alone session to look at the cost-effectiveness of various social housing delivery streams. A number of us want to do this, and it can be informed by the Department's report. Separately, we need to do the same thing with all of the various Government interventions on affordable housing, such as the local infrastructure housing activation fund, LIHAF, and the serviced sites fund. The question of land is completely separate. What often happens is we focus on a scheme, for example, LIHAF or the serviced sites fund, and we ignore what is actually going on in the marketplace for land that affects public and private. There is loads of land out there that belongs to public agencies but it may or may not be available for housing. That land is valued at various prices and it can be bought and sold. What has happened over the past three decades is that reports have been done and they are very detailed. The previous Oireachtas committee spent four years examining issues and we never got a chance to look at the land question itself. There would be a value in it.

Members must remember that we can have two-hour meetings and if we have four or five witnesses who have five minutes each, after which we get into questions, if we have too many topics, we will not get to discuss anything. While these sessions are interrelated, they will work very well in parallel.

The land issue should look at public and private land. The market in land is the most opaque. There is no record of what is bought or sold or for what price. There is no record of what public land is or is not being used or is being rightly used or not rightly used. It would be useful for us, particularly with regard to Dublin city because prices are probably affecting affordability in private and public delivery there more than anywhere else.