Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I strongly agree with this group of amendments. As the Minister said, the debate around these amendments relates to the fundamental differences between the Government and many in the Opposition in terms of what a land development agency should do.

It is interesting that the Minister mentioned the Shanganagh Castle development as an example of a fundamental difference. Shanganagh Castle shows exactly that the LDA is now replacing the role of the local authority. To put the Minister straight, the Opposition parties certainly did not delay the development of Shanganagh Castle. I was campaigning to get public housing on the Shanganagh site from the moment it was handed over by the Department of Justice to the local authority 15 years ago.

Since then and up until now, Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council has continued to be run by a combination of Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael-led councils. In all those years I campaigned to get public housing on that site, we never got a sod turned. Some of the time, it was because of the lack of enthusiasm from the Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael-led councils. Most of the time, it was a combination of that with the failure of central government to offer any money to do it anyway. I can, however, tell the Minister that those of us who now feel there needs to be a different role for the LDA were precisely the ones who were campaigning for public and affordable housing on that site.

Of course, what delayed it was the policy that was introduced, of which the LDA is the latest and most developed example, of insisting that private money came in on the development of the site. There was an established pathway to sourcing money for the solely public development of a site whereby one applied to central government, which approved money because it was public housing.

What has stymied and slowed it to the point where we still do not have a sod turned 15 years on was the insistence that in some shape or form the site had to be marketised and private finance had to be brought in. Then we had years of Departments and local authorities scratching their heads and asking how they can make it work if they bring private finance in. Private finance completely skews the pitch because it has a completely different objective and approach from what a local authority has and to the way local authorities traditionally build public housing. It ends up in a scenario with all these different tenure types, different financing models, different notions of affordability, references to the market and all the stuff that has been crystallised in the Minister's Bill. The LDA is substituting for the local authorities, it is delaying the delivery of public and affordable housing and it is effectively a marketising of public land with the replete references in this Bill to local market conditions, market rents, market prices and all the things that should not be relevant at all to the development of the public land bank.

What should the Land Development Agency do rather than what the Minister is proposing it will do? It should aggressively go after the speculators, land hoarders and people sitting on vacant buildings. It is infuriating to people when they look at empty buildings being sat on by speculators and investors. They want the State's Land Development Agency to go after these people and take the empty buildings and zoned building land they are sitting on and drip feeding into the market at a pace that suits them to keep land prices up and essentially manipulate the market. That is what we want a Land Development Agency to do. That was the general thrust of the Kenny report many years ago. We do not want a Land Development Agency as a substitute for the local authorities or to marketise public land.