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

I thank Councillors Sheahan and Hoade for their presentations and written submissions. It is very significant that both LAMA and the AILG have come out with some very strong and reasonable concerns about the legislation. I share many of those concerns and I will happily table all 14 of the amendments. I urge other Senators and Deputies to do likewise. If we had a cross-party approach to this, it would make it all the stronger. Sinn Féin's strong view is that the LDA should be involved in land assembly and that local authorities should be involved in residential development. If those two things were done in parallel, I think we could start delivering the kinds of numbers of units Mr. Sheahan rightly outlines. My concern is the arguments the Government is using for the provisions of the Bill that they are concerned about. I would therefore like to give the witnesses the opportunity to respond in a little more detail to some of the Government's rationale. My questions are very straightforward. The Government is claiming that it has to set up the LDA this way because local authorities do not have the capacity or the ability to deliver the number of social and affordable homes needed. I would be interested to hear both organisations' responses to that. The Government is also claiming that the removal of the section 183 land disposal powers is required to speed up residential delivery, something I do not agree with. Again, I would like to hear the witnesses' responses to that. The Bill's definition of affordability is any discount on median price, rent or purchase, which means that in some constituencies in Dublin one could be looking at prices of around €400,000. Do the witnesses have a view on that aspect of the Bill? Then, crucially, there is the power to give the LDA development authority status so it could do strategic development zones. I am thinking in particular about Limerick and the Colbert site. The local authority could be fully excluded from an SDZ process, whereby the LDA would do the draft and the board would approve it and elected members would be relegated simply to third party observers. Do the witnesses have concerns about any of that?