Mr. John Sheahan:

The number of houses is the key to getting everything sorted. The question is how to produce the number of houses required. We have a broken system at the moment, we think. That is evidenced when you see developers opting for the ready cash of private investment portfolios rather than being able to go to the market, to the local bank, and to finance their own developments. We are concerned that the LDA might become the other side of that coin in that it would be attracted to the developers just to produce public housing and maybe sit on a parcel of land just waiting until the Government comes rolling in with the cash to provide the housing.

As for section 183, perhaps some of the other Members of the Oireachtas might be able to assist on this, but LAMA has raised that issue directly with the Minister. I think he is considering that the diminution of that would be a last resort, whereby a local authority would not be able to make a case for the lands it has or have a project that would suit the lands lying idle.

If that was the situation, we would probably be open to some sort of litigation.

We would like the LDA DAC to be modelled on land publicly owned by the State outside of the local authorities. This is because we are on a crash course straight away with the elected members at local authority level, whereas if we tried it from bureaucrat to bureaucrat we might see what way we are modelling it and how it works. That would be a good pilot to start with.

Deputy Ó Broin mentioned the Colbert Station development in Limerick. We have engaged with the LDA through our own DAC, Limerick 2030. I sit on the board of the latter. It has been an eye-opener to me especially with regulation and procurement and so on. The amount of expertise that we need to get projects rolling is phenomenal. The LDA could be the answer for Ireland Inc. in that regard.

We have been working well with the LDA to date. I am not in favour of a situation where we can say a strategic development zone could freeze us out of the loop. That would be a detrimental step. There is some tweaking to be done, but we can ratchet it up outside the local authorities. I am not saying the local authority should abdicate responsibility. We will still keep our targets going and so on. However, we should model the new DAC with publicly owned lands other than local authority lands.