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

To be honest, I am gravely concerned by all of this, following on from the last questions. The entire zoned land bank should be in public ownership. If we need to zone more land, it should all be owned by local authorities or the State in some shape or form, so there cannot be speculation. There is nothing in what the Minister has said to give us any comfort that there will not be rampant speculation. As soon as this land is owned, assuming it is in private hands, its value will immediately go through the roof. The Government will be enriching people. Why on earth would we enrich private landowners in the current climate rather than ensuring that the State owns that land? It will probably involve letting private builders building on land but where the Government controls it and ensures that there is not speculation and it that keeps the price down, which is a major contributory factor to the unaffordability of the stuff that is being built at the moment.

Maybe these are available, and the Minister can point me to where they are, but can we have the basic facts and figures? How much zoned land is there? How many planning permissions are unactivated? From what I can see from the guidelines is that the reason the Minister has said that local authorities can go 50% beyond the baseline is not that in many cases there is not enough zoned land but that the zoned land has unactivated permissions. In other words, there is already people speculating on it. So the Minister is saying we will zone more but it is, potentially, just extending the problem. We need the evidence for all of this.

There are 9,000 unactioned permissions in Dún Laoghaire which would be sufficient to meet the housing needs of the county, so there is not actually any need for any rezonings. I am not saying we should not rezone but I am absolutely against us just willy-nilly rezoning if it is just going to enrich private owners of land but not guarantee housing delivery or affordable housing delivery and, potentially, be another area of speculation. What does the Minister say about that? Can we have the hard evidence on this? How many permissions are there, how much zoned land is there, how many units could that deliver and how much of it is unactioned?