Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 25 May 2021

Select Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government

Land Development Agency Bill 2021: Committee Stage

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

Yes. We have had a masterclass in sophistry from the Minister and of course he thoroughly misrepresented the situation. The original proposals, quite a long way back, for the development of Shanganagh were to have private development. The People Before Profit Party in particular tabled motions insisting that the development would only be public and affordable. Then there was a big battle on the council and eventually that position was won. The original plan, even before the LDA, was to have some of the site privately developed. Yes, we, through campaigning and very significant local public anger at the thought that the site would be in any way privatised, forced a position where there was finally a commitment that the site would only comprise public and affordable housing.

What I am worried about, given the make up of the LDA, is that the victory in establishing that the Shanganagh site will only be public and affordable will unravel because of the insistence in this Bill about relating affordability and rents to local market conditions thus rendering references to "affordable" meaningless in the context of the Dún Laoghaire constituency. Of course, our rents and market houses prices are so off the Richter scale that about 99% of working people are excluded from the market. If, as this Bill proposes, that affordable purchase, affordable or, indeed, even rents, as the Bill explicitly states, are related to local market rents and prices then the affordable will not be affordable either in terms of house prices or rents. So that is why, just to explain to the Minister, my later amendment is an attempt to put an insurance policy in against what the LDA might do to a hard-won position of establishing Shanganagh as a 100% public and affordable site. That position was won in the teeth of very significant opposition from Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil.

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