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

I support Deputy Cian O'Callaghan's amendment. I will explain the logic of my slightly subsidiary amendments. The section of the legislation in question is one of the weaker ones. It is not a new one in the sense that while the original general scheme of the LDA Bill brought before us in 2019 by the then Minister, Mr. Eoghan Murphy, did not include this provision, he made it very clear that a limited CPO power would be included in the Bill. That was subsequently confirmed by Mr. John Coleman from the LDA. The problem is that this is not what was originally envisaged in the national planning framework, to which the origins of a land management agency can be traced back. It was always the desire of the senior civil servants who initiated the idea of an active land management agency and those other State actors who have been supporting such an initiative, such as the National Economic and Social Council, NESC, to have a body with very powerful CPO powers. It would have those powers for two reasons. The first is so that when negotiating with other public stakeholders, it would have strong powers to ensure they would come to the table and provide land at the appropriate price. It would also mean the active land management agency would be able to force holders of land, public or private, who are not using it to bring it to the table. That is a key provision for any strategic land management agency. In the absence of that, it would only be a matter of small strips of land that would be necessary to purchase compulsorily to gain access to a bigger piece of land the LDA already has - I refer to ransom strips - is really a fundamental weakness and one of the great tragedies of this legislation. It is an enormous missed opportunity.

Part of the reason for what I describe is that if we were to give comprehensive CPO powers to the LDA, as currently constituted, as in a commercial DAC, potentially competing with other DACs, it would run afoul of state aid rules in the EU and there could be legal challenges in the European courts, as happened with the National Asset Management Agency, NAMA. Therefore, it is about protecting the original Fine Gael idea of a land development agency as a commercial residential developer rather than a strategic land assembler.

My two amendments are straightforward. One is to put the focus on land assembly and transfer to those bodies that should be building the homes we want, namely local authorities, approved housing bodies and community housing trusts. The second amendment, drafted by the Association of Irish Local Government, AILG, is to ensure local authorities are not subject to any CPO powers because that undermines the right of elected members to approve or object to the disposal of land under section 183 of the local government legislation.