Dr. Seán Healy:

On the land speculation issue, we have a long track record of trying to get this issue dealt with. Before the last era of land speculation, never mind the current one, we were advocating a variation on approaches that had been talked about back in the 1970s. A mechanism for getting control of the costs involved would be that rezoning could be done only on land that was already owned by the local authority. In other words, it would buy the land and there would be a top-up profit margin for the person who had sold it but then it would be in the ownership of the local authority, which could rezone it, and it would not create a windfall profit. We have other ideas. It is a critical issue that needs to be addressed.