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

I will speak to the last number of amendments I have in this group. First, it is important to remember that the LDA was established in September 2018. It will be five years before it delivers a single home. That does not appear to suggest it has either the capacity, ability or the urgency to meet the challenges of the housing crisis. In fact, if the former Deputy, Eoghan Murphy, had funded Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council to develop Shanganagh Castle when the elected members of that local authority unanimously agreed on a very good scheme, people would be living in the first tranche of those homes today. Therefore, the argument that it is quicker to set up a new State agency to deliver homes rather than funding the local authorities directly to deliver large-scale projects is simply not the case.

One of the worries I have about LDA sites, for example, the Dundrum central site, which will be one of the key ones in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown, is that we do not know yet, because we cannot be told either by the Minister or the agency, how many or what percentage of the homes on that site will be at an unaffordable, open market price. It is the same with the St. Kevin's HSE site in Cork. If the Minister wants to know how we would dramatically increase the delivery of genuinely affordable homes, we should stop using public land to deliver unaffordable, open market price homes. As the Minister knows, tonight there will be a special meeting of Fingal County Council to deal with the lands in Donabate for 1,200 much-needed homes. The proposition from the local authority, essentially under instruction from the Department, is that 60% of those homes, almost 800, will be sold at open market prices. The open market prices, according to the local authority, range from €340,000 to €450,000. Why anybody would allow homes at that price to be built and sold on public land when we could ensure every home there was affordable to the electorate that elected the Minister and other Deputies makes very little sense.

The other big issue is that we were originally told that the LDA was going to deliver 7,500 homes per year and that it would deliver 150,000 social, affordable and private homes over 20 years. However, according to the agency, and it gave this committee its pipeline figures a number of months ago, by 2025 when this Government is coming to the end of its term of office, if it gets that far, only a couple of thousand homes will be delivered by it and a portion of those will be unaffordable private houses.

There is one final matter, and it is important that the Minister clarifies this. My understanding is that the Department's four-stage approval, tendering and procurement process will not apply to the LDA in the same way as it would apply to the local authority because there will be a designated activities company or subsidiary. My point was not that the public spending code does not apply, but that it does not apply in the same way. Therefore, local authority officials will say that, from their point of view, if there is an advantage to transferring the delivery of a project to the LDA, it is that it dramatically reduces the bureaucracy and staff time for them. If that is the case, and I believe it is, why not just reform that process, remove the bureaucracy from the local authorities and give them the funding to deliver? They are much better placed to deliver these projects if only they were assisted to do so. On that basis, I am only more convinced of the legitimacy of the amendments I have proposed, having heard the Minister's replies. I will press the amendments.