Mr. John Coleman:

I will be concise. I refer to the identification of lands in the State lands report that we produced and classifying them as such. The report is a statement of fact and the constraints on the land mean that where we have lowly constrained lands, we can target our attention on those because they are quicker to develop. It is useful to identify them. That does not mean we ignore the moderately constrained lands. What could we do to speed those up? It might be opportunities through zoning. Local authorities that have been asked to look at rezoning lands might provide an opportunity for some of those lands in that report.

The thing to note is that we should not be limited as the LDA, or the State, to public lands only. There is plenty of private land out there. Land is relatively cheap in comparison to the build costs. For instance, we paid €19,000 per apartment plot, on average, for a large site we acquired from the private sector for 4,300 homes in and around Clongriffin DART station. It costs approximately €400,000 to deliver an apartment so that is only 5% of the overall cost. We should not limit ourselves purely to public land. Where we have public land, speeding it up could perhaps be done through rezoning and the relocation of some of the legitimate services that are already on them. That would be something to look at.

On the self-construction piece, we have looked at that before. The public body nature of procurement and the specialisms there are in construction make it tricky but it is an interesting concept. It is not something we focus on now because we believe there is capacity in the big main contractors to help us achieve our aims in the years ahead.