Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I will address the legislation before us because we have spent much of the morning debating council decisions, which relate to previous policies. This Bill is about a new Government putting in place new policies to set a new direction in housing. There are two elements to those policies - the Minister rightly spoke about the Affordable Housing Bill, and the second is this Bill. Deputy Gould should read the former, as everything he called for, or discussed calling for in his maiden speech all those years ago, is in the Affordable Housing Bill. They are the tools the councils need to develop lands.

The amendments seek to rephrase what is in the Bill. A number of Opposition Deputies and Senators have misunderstood what the Bill is about, that is, taking public lands with a market value and permanently devaluing them so that the land cost can be eliminated from providing homes, effectively giving those lands a nominal value regardless of who owns them. It ensures that, as homes are built on these lands in accordance with the Bill and other mechanisms, the land cost will not contribute to the cost of those homes. The Bill represents the largest single permanent devaluation of the cost of land.

I can find no reference in the Bill that speaks to Deputy Boyd Barrett's fears that this is about the privatisation of land. I have combed through it and the amendments and I cannot see where they allow the State to give large tracts of public land to a private developer to make a profit. If anything, the Bill attaches a permanent devaluation mechanism that ensures that, as the Minister said, the land value in places such as Dublin will effectively be nominal because of the cost of building. The mechanism outlined in the Bill is clear but, in some of these amendments, we are dancing on the head of a pin to be seen to rephrase something that is already in the Bill.