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

There seems to be something of an admission on the part of the Minister the section my amendment is trying to delete needs to be deleted. That is a good start. However, he cannot tell us what it will be replaced with, only that it will be broadly aligned with the Affordable Housing Bill. I would like the Minister to tell us as much as he can about that because it is not satisfactory we are now on Committee Stage of this Bill and we do not know what the Government will do on Report Stage. We have not seen the Report Stage amendments the Government will make on this critical point of whether the LDA is capable of delivering affordable housing on public land.

The Government appears to be acknowledging the point of my amendment, which is to say there should not be any relationship between how you price affordablility and local market conditions. Is the Minister accepting this is correct, that local market conditions should not be criteria for setting the price of affordable housing or affordable rental? That would be an important step forward by the Government. I am happy to admit when the Government puts its hands up and says it was wrong and will change things. Is the Minister saying we are right that the benchmark against prices and rents at the local market level is not an acceptable way of defining affordability? If that is in any way a criterion, I put it to the Minister that he essentially will have undermined the attempt to deal with the housing crisis and the affordability crisis in the areas where these crises are most acute and where the response is most badly needed.