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

I have to respond to two of the Minister's points. The idea that the LDA is acting as some sort of supplement to the local authorities rather than supplanting them is, quite honestly, just nonsense. There is no better example than Shanganagh. There has been delay after delay for years and years. Central government has refused to just give the local authority the money to build on its own land because it had the LDA, or something like it, in mind for years and wanted to have a private commercial component to the development of that public land, which is now crystallised in the LDA. Whereas there could have been one way of applying for central funding and building out if the local authorities were the lead and were resourced to build, nothing has happened because central government could not make up its mind as to how precisely it was going to drag the private market and private finance into the whole process. As a consequence, we still have no idea what the price of affordable housing at Shanganagh will be and, of course, not a sod has been turned.

This brings me to my second point. Could the Minister please explain why the cap on affordable housing in my area, for example, is €450,000 while in other areas it is €400,000, €350,000, €250,000 and so on? Will he please explain that? As I see it, the Minister is setting the level of so-called affordability in my area based on the fact that house prices are much higher there. Affordability is being linked to local market conditions and, therefore, such housing will not be affordable. A cost of €450,000 or even €400,000 is not affordable but that is what we are going to get from the LDA.

That brings me to the amendments themselves. Deputy Ó Broin has already made the point about the designated activity companies, DACs. There is to be the LDA itself, which will then set up subsidiaries which are allowed enter into commercial arrangements with other bodies. Guess who those other bodies are. It is a reference to private finance and private developers. That is what it is all about. Through our proposed deletions of parts of the Title of the Bill, we are trying to guard against all of that stuff and to ensure that the sole purpose of any such agency is to deliver public and genuinely affordable housing to people on a broad range of incomes and to ensure that, insofar as we build affordable housing, not only will it be genuinely affordable, but it will stay genuinely affordable in perpetuity. This housing could never be marketised. Of course, the Minister does not want that because it would be no good at all to his private financier and developer friends in their efforts to profit from the public land bank. That is the logic of amendments Nos. 236 and 238.