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

Deputy O'Callaghan has made a very good point about the Chivers site because, from memory, the developer doubled the price of the site from €5 million to €10 million. If the councillors had been able to apply an affordable housing zoning condition to the land, that could not have happened and that site could be used in a more useful way. However, it also misses the point of the amendment. There are housing plans, strategies, policies and funding streams but zoning is about land use. It is about saying, as a local authority or State, we are deciding this it what we want this portion of land to be used for. In exactly the same way as we make distinctions between different types of economic activity such as retail, light commercial, heavy commercial, industrial, etc., so too we should be able to empower local authorities to make a distinction between types of housing in terms of affordability. I appreciate that we are not going to convince the Minister of State but it is important to put on record the merit of the amendments because we will come back to this at some stage as it becomes increasingly difficult for Government to deliver affordable homes within its own schemes and targets.

We will come back to this at some stage. As it becomes increasingly difficult for Government to deliver affordable homes within its own schemes and targets, alternative ways of ensuring those homes are delivered will have to be looked at. When we come back to this in one, two, or three years, some of us might be here pointing out that if only these amendments had been accepted, we would not have had to waste all that time. I wish to put that on the record.