Mr. Jim Baneham:

The Deputy asked about the passing on of land to the private sector, which relates to the two sites I discussed, and the site on the Enniskerry Road. At the moment, the Enniskerry Road land is in the ownership of Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, but the arrangement will pass the ownership on to approved housing bodies, AHBs, which are regulated social housing providers. That is an example of land being managed long-term by AHBs. The intention with the other proposals in Skerries and Naas is that their long-term ownership will be controlled by the State and will not be passed on. We have other models, and there has been some interaction with the NDFA on one of them. It relates to market purchases on the site in Westmeath but it could be adopted or rolled out further in respect of affordable purchases, where a developer will undertake a development but the land is only transferred to the ultimate purchaser and the developer does not take possession of it at all. The person who gets the land after the dwellings have been built is the person who is buying the house. There are definitely ways the State can keep control of land into the future and only pass it on to the end user. That is an operational scheme.

There are particular constraints regarding the Enniskerry Road site in terms of making cost rental more affordable. The other sites are more benign in their characteristics and consequently, we are optimistic that we could achieve better results in that regard. The land we are using is from the land aggregation scheme, so the State did pay for it, and in passing the land on at no cost, the State is effectively providing a subsidy. That is the case with the Enniskerry Road site, as well as with the other sites I mentioned.

Where a large parcel of land is being passed on, as with the bigger development in Balbriggan, for instance, it might be deemed appropriate to have a private-purchase element or a price put on it. Alternatively, there might be a commercial element, as it might be deemed appropriate for a parcel of land large enough to have an Aldi, Lidl or other development to have an economic value put on it.

On the broader issue of land, the focus of the Land Development Agency is trying to assemble land from the NDFA, some local authorities and other commercial entities from the State sector. Land values are definitely a significant barrier to affordability. I do not have a simple answer as to how to deal with that, unfortunately.