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

I support all three amendments. I will speak to Deputy Boyd Barrett's amendments first.

A really important principle is at play here. One of the great weaknesses of the current affordable housing schemes, as they have been rolled out, obviously prior to the enactment of the affordable housing legislation and the introduction of this legislation, is that where homes are affordable - not all of them are, as we know from earlier discussions - they are affordable only to the first purchaser. While there is a clawback built into the equity share that the local authority retains to ensure a purchaser cannot make a windfall profit from land he or she did not effectively purchase in the first instance, an affordable property is no longer affordable once sold. Imagine if, instead of having such schemes, we strategically used public land to build up, over a decade, a stock of thousands of privately owned, permanently affordable, but tradeable, homes. Whether they would be sold back to the local authority, as is the preference of Deputy Boyd Barrett, or sold directly to the next purchaser in need of an affordable home is a separate issue. An almost secondary market would be built up. There would be social and cost-rental homes at one end and private and in many cases unaffordable homes at the other, but there would be thousands of permanently affordable homes that people could buy or sell. Who are these people? Currently, they comprise 80% to 85% of the working population based on the eligibility criteria that most of us believe are necessary. These could be altered. The measure would ensure that, in perpetuity, we would always have homes that the category of people in question could purchase.

With respect to the proposition put forward by Deputy Cian O'Callaghan, this is really important, so-----