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

On the last point about the role of the local authorities and the disposal of land, to be honest, the Minister is being somewhat disingenuous. If one takes Shanganagh, it was the non-elected executive that proposed the transfer of that site to the LDA. It was Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, the usual suspects, which supported it. We opposed that transfer because we had been campaigning for years for the council to build public and affordable housing on that site.

I am not quite sure how the relationship between the Department and county managers and so on works. They are certainly not told what to do by the directly elected representatives. It was the non-elected executive's proposal to transfer the land to the LDA. That was because the policy of this Government and its predecessor wanted private finance and private investment involved in the development of public lands.

I will not labour the point but it slowed the process. I remember Brendan Kenny explaining to the housing committee in the previous Dáil how, if the local authority built on its own land, there was one process for finance, planning and so on. With the Minister's proposal, there will be three processes. The evidence speaks for itself in my opinion.

On the substantial issue of the amendment itself, does the Minister recognise that the problem of private owners hoarding land suitable for housing is a problem? Everybody else does. If the LDA is not going to be the agency to deal with that problem, who will deal with it? To me, that would have been one of the central purposes of setting up such an agency, as Deputy Cian O'Callaghan said, going right back to the sort of thinking behind the Kenny report. Does the Minister recognise it as a problem? If he does, why on earth would he delay this when we are setting up an agency that could have the power to actually do something to deal with the significant problem of land hoarding and activating privately owned land that could be used for housing to help us to address the housing crisis?