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

That site should have been zoned exclusively for affordable and-or social housing. It should not be allowed to be another US embassy that we do not need or, for that matter, to be used for unaffordable housing, which it could have been at one stage when Seán Dunne had some outrageous plan for it. The site should have been seen as strategically important and should have been specifically zoned to assist in dealing with the housing crisis. Having a form of zoning available where a local authority could say this was the case would be an important tool in the armoury of local authorities in seeking to address the existing housing crisis in their own areas. Local authorities should be given the ability to guarantee and ensure that certain strategically important sites, of which I am giving one example, would contribute to helping solve the housing crisis and would not be used for anything else. That is another rationale for doing this.

We could name many other sites as well. I recall arguing this point when the Cherrywood SDZ was being done up. Of course, I got the same answer then, when I was told we could not have this approach. I had suggested that a higher proportion than 10% should have been allocated for social and affordable housing. This is the biggest residential development in the country now. When we were doing the SDZ for that site, I suggested that we should have zoned a bigger proportion of it exclusively for social and affordable housing, but I was told it was not possible to do that. This was a site that could have contributed enormously to the resolution of the housing crisis and even have helped to prevent it from getting as bad as it has, particularly when the public had put so much money into the infrastructure there. If we look at the prices of the very modest housing going up there now, the lowest price people will pay for a house in Cherrywood is €600,000. It is more likely that people will pay €700,000. For a four-bedroom house, meanwhile, people will pay €800,000. When we see those prices, we think, "For God's sake, we paid for the flipping infrastructure of this site". We also gave it special zoning, put in the Luas line and put in the parks, and now the company is charging €600,000, €700,000 and €800,000 for these houses. It is flipping outrageous.

Local authorities, therefore, should have had, and even now should have, the option available to them to allow them to designate a site as strategically important in the context of the housing crisis and state that the land in question will be used for one purpose and one purpose only, namely, to provide affordable and-or social housing. This is a very sensible suggestion and the Government should accept it.