Mr. John Coleman:

I understand.

Designated activity companies, DACs, are widely deployed by State agencies just to manage their affairs in an appropriate way. For instance, God forbid, if something went wrong on one site, we would want to ring-fence it from another site to ensure it did not impact it. It makes total sense. It is just normal structuring. There is nothing unusual about it. It is totally normal for State bodies, as well as anyone else.

The only significant way I would see the privatisation of lands happening is by making affordable homes available to people to buy. Obviously, they would own the piece of land on which the home is built. I cannot see the Land Development Agency flipping sites into the market or anything like that. The agency is firmly focused on making sure that social and affordable homes are delivered on these lands.

Our focus is utilising our own capital. For State lands, we have €1.25 billion of capital available to us. We can borrow a further €1.25 billion, resulting in €2.5 billion of firepower. We have a good bit of building to do to work our way through that before thinking about investment. We are very much focused on using those resources available to us in the immediate term.

On the point about not building social housing, we will be releasing our business plan shortly after the enactment of the Land Development Agency Bill. While I cannot go into it too much, social housing features quite prominently. We plan on engaging with local authorities, approved housing bodies and other social housing providers to understand what the opportunity is to provide social housing on sites that we access. We think that makes a lot of sense in terms of social mix. It also makes a lot of sense in terms of having a multitude of ways in which we can deliver badly needed homes, both in the social and affordable sector, rather than just focusing on anyone particular avenue. That is firmly on our radar.

I thank the Senator for giving me the opportunity to address some of those concerns.