Mr. John Coleman:

We generally do not see that. We do not see people holding on to land that could be readily developed as housing. We have had a number of breakthroughs recently with lands that that have been made available to us. For instance, part of the car park in Leopardstown Racecourse has been released to us for the development of around 800 homes. We have had good success in accessing State land. The reality the State land bank is finite. It will not be enough to fulfil all of the LDA's ambitions with regard to housing delivery. That is why, and the Deputy referenced the announcement by the Government today, the mandate to acquire private sector lands on the market, which we have done in certain cases already, has been clearly mandated to us and further supported by the Government, which will help too.

On the compulsion regarding land transfers, we do not have the ability to compel State bodies to transfer land to us. However, the Government can help us in brokering some of those land transfers where we cannot agree them directly with the State bodies concerned. The good piece of news about State land is that local authorities tend to be the ones that hold land for housing purposes within State bodies, and we have a very strong relationship with them with respect to developing those lands for them as a service provider essentially, where we design, plan, finance and build the schemes for them.

On the specific point about Colbert Quarter, that is an extremely complex site-----