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

This section really gets to the heart of what is wrong with the Bill and the Government's whole conception of the LDA. It is the dirty little secret behind the Land Development Agency. The agency should be about gathering up land that is being sat on by private developers and speculators, or land being held by Departments or State agencies other than local authorities, and ensuring that land is developed for public and genuinely affordable housing. Instead, we have an agency that is creating the opportunity to sell off public land to investment funds, speculators and private developers. These are the very people who are responsible for the current housing and homelessness crisis. There is simply no justification whatsoever for disposing of public land or involving private finance, speculators, developers or investment funds with the public land bank. In fact, they threaten to undermine any attempt to deliver the public and affordable housing that some of us in opposition have been pointing out for a decade is needed to address this crisis. This is NAMA part 2, to put it simply. We warned about NAMA originally. NAMA should have been used to deliver public and affordable housing but instead it was used to flog off land-----