Ms Orla Hegarty:

Affordable ownership gets to the crux of the issue. A lot of people want to buy a house but many in Dublin cannot afford to. There is a mismatch between the ESRI research into income levels and property prices in Dublin. We could provide everybody with expensive houses and subsidise them to maintain the market or we could crash the market and put everybody who has a house in negative equity again. The issue is finding some way to have a parallel system through leases, community land trusts or something else that creates a secondary market in housing, affordable to people within their own means but not competing directly with the private market. The scale of the challenge for affordability in Dublin is enormous and a niche scheme for a certain percentage of the market, or a discounted market, will not meet the need. The ambition needs to be much greater.

External oversight is important in the context of confidentiality and freedom of information. I have experience of looking for information under the FOI Acts where the local authority decided it was confidential. I took the case to the Information Commissioner for a determination on the legal aspects. It would be within the remit of the LDA to withhold information on the basis of commercial sensitivity in a narrow area such as market rates, though there should not be a blanket exemption. There is a provision for an external determination on points of law.