Mr. Tom Dunne:

The question of active land management and the issues around that is one of the great deficiencies of our planning system and needs to be addressed for sure. I did not see this agency as being a particular way of doing that but thought that it would have a role in it. The sense I got from the legislation was that it was intended to take lands that are already in the ownership of the State in various forms, which are often just there and are not needed for the purpose for which the entity that holds them is going to make use of in the future, so the question about such lands is what does one do about them.

The option preferred by the local authority, the HSE and other agencies is to flog that land, to put on the marketplace and see what happens. The Land Development Agency, LDA, is intended to prevent that from happening. Instead those lands will be taken and managed by the Land Development Agency. Active land management and the related issues are a different question. While I agree with a lot of what has been said about active land management, which is one of the great deficiencies in our system, this is meant as a more specific agency, which I believe the State needs. The State has a management agency in the Office of Public Works, OPW, which largely looks after the management of properties used by the State. The Land Development Agency is intended to take the lands that are no longer needed by the State and which must be put to some other use. With the current crisis in the sector, the most logical thing to do with all that land is to use it for housing, if it can be converted to that purpose. Some 15 or 20 years down the road we might have a shortage of land for industrial purposes, as we had in the past. This agency is intended to perform a more specific function. It should not be opposed because it does not perform a range of other tasks which are definitely needed in our planning system, like active land management. That is why when I read this Bill I felt the State needed a tool like this agency to perform this specific function.