Darragh O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I assure Deputy O'Callaghan I am extremely serious about delivering affordable and social homes to the Land Development Agency at scale. That is not just talking about it but actually doing something about it, as colleagues in Fingal County Council did on Tuesday. I do not defend that by the way, but I welcome it. The Deputy will have to explain, as Deputies Ó Broin and Boyd Barrett did, why his colleagues voted against 238 social homes, 238 affordable homes and 150 cost rental homes. That is for the Deputy to do.

We need to move on from the sound-bite element of the Deputy's contributions to dealing with the facts on the ground. We need affordable and social homes at scale. The Government has brought forward the largest housing budget in the history of the State to deliver 9,500 new builds and new social homes through our local authorities. On top of that, the LDA will not supplant local authorities, as Deputy Boyd Barrett said, but supplement them. That is exactly what it will do and is what we intend it to do.

The Deputy mentioned Shanganagh Castle. I accept that we are at the start of this Bill. We can discuss specific sites and what has happened in the past but the reality is the housing on the Shanganagh Castle site will be 100% social and affordable. I intend that the LDA will break ground on the site this year. That is the position. I will not accept these amendments.

To go back to Deputy Ó Broin's point, it is a fact that the agency he wants will not be allowed to build or plan. He wants a land management agency that cannot build homes or plan to build homes. That is fundamentally what he has said today and also on Tuesday. That is not a reasonable proposition or one that anyone could stand over. If we all agree we need to utilise State-owned land productively for our people in the middle of a housing crisis, we had better get on with it.

We are establishing the LDA as a commercial State company on the basis that we want the agency to be able to access the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund, ISIF, and other funding in the future to be able to deliver. This is so it can operate on a counter-cyclical basis and can have a real role in delivering housing. Deputy Ó Broin regularly refers to building 20,000 public homes each year but never says where they will be built, who will build them or how long it will take. We have an agency that can add to our public and affordable housing stock by managing and developing State land above and beyond council land. We need to get on with that.

The amendments seek to amend the Long Title of the Bill to reflect other amendments the Deputies have tabled. While we are early in the Committee Stage process, we have been jumping from one grouping to another and referring to other amendments that are further down the line. We will address those when we reach that part of the Bill. As I said, I am open to looking at amendments that are reasonable if they will benefit the legislation and the operation of the agency. I appreciate the consideration Deputies have given to the Bill and the detailed amendments they are seeking to have made. However, I cannot accept the amendments to the Long Title in this group as they do not reflect the intent of the Bill.

The Bill seeks to increase supply of housing, particularly affordable and social homes, by ensuring that public land is not being underutilised by not being made available for housing. It also provides for the establishment of the LDA as a commercial State body to deliver that housing. There is obviously a fundamental difference between what the Government wants - a land development agency to deliver housing - and what Deputy Ó Broin wants. He has said he does not want the agency to develop homes and does not believe it should be involved in residential development. That is not a reasonable proposition in any way, shape or form.

It is wholly appropriate that the LDA will be established as a designated activity company under the Companies Act. This is in line with other commercial State bodies. As I said, the Ministers for Housing, Local Government and Heritage and Public Expenditure and Reform will be the shareholders. There will not be any other shareholders. This will ensure the LDA is publicly owned, as it is. Whatever way people want to try to twist the narrative, the agency will be fully publicly owned. It is necessary that the LDA has a shareholding as this facilitates the €1.25 billion investment from ISIF. What is that money and investment from ISIF for? It is to deliver social and affordable homes for our people. Who could be against that?

Under the programme for Government, the LDA is being assigned a key role in housing delivery and will also work as an additional resource, providing services to assist the local authorities, such as master-planning. A couple of Deputies, including Deputy Ó Broin, have said the LDA should not be involved in this. One would have thought that should be a shared service and that on appropriate sites the LDA could offer its expertise to local authorities. Is there something wrong with that? I fail to see what is wrong with that, other than it is another opportunity for Members to find a reason not to support the Bill. It is appropriate and in line with other State bodies that have a development role, such as IDA Ireland and the Grangegorman Development Agency. It will not, however, have the full development agency role involving planning powers that local authorities have. As I said on Tuesday, it will not have the full development agency role. I will not be accepting these amendments.