Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 23 January 2024

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government

Update on Affordable Homes, Public Lands, Strategic Planning and Projects: Land Development Agency

Mr. John Coleman:

I can. I will take the Clongriffin example first and then give another example of the way we are thinking around this. We have gone out to tender on Clongriffin because we just want to get going on the first 408 homes out of the potential 2,300 on that site. We want to get going and start construction this year on that. That is the urgency that needs to be put into these situations. We are keen to get going on them. We are very likely to go back to look at the plans for the overall site again. In an area that can yield approximately 2,300 homes, affordable purchase has to be part of that.

I will give an example of our thinking on that. At Shanganagh, there are affordable purchase apartments and houses that will be released to the market this year because we wanted to ensure a good mix of tenure there. As well as that, on a site we are looking at through Project Tosaigh at Horgan's Quay, Cork, we are exploring with the house builder the potential for the Croí Cónaithe scheme to be applied to make some of those apartments saleable to people for purchase as owner-occupiers in order that not all of the properties would be cost rental and social, but homeowners would be in there as well. We are quite keen to push that. It even makes sense from our perspective if we can sell some homes. The LDA is very capital intensive because we put out all the money to build and acquire homes but because we hold and rent them, it only trickles back in over a very long period.

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