Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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I am sorry, Chair. I put up a hand, but it does not matter.

I need to set the record straight. I presume that Deputy McAuliffe, who is referring to the Bill, has read it. The Bill very clearly refers to the setting of affordable prices and rents and relating them to discounts on local market conditions. It refers to the establishment of DACs for the different parcels of land that will be developed. It also refers to commercial activity. Without a shadow of a doubt, all of these elements marketise the land. Why would one relate affordability to local market conditions? They are not even average market conditions. If we averaged out rents and prices across the places in the country with high rents and house prices and those parts with low rents and prices, we would get a bad enough figure for affordability, but the Bill refers to local market conditions. In all of the areas where the affordability and housing crises are at their most intense, this would be a disastrous benchmark against which to set affordability. Average rents in my area are anywhere between €2,500 and €3,000. Average house prices are between €500,000 and €600,000. Benchmarking affordability against local market conditions means that, even if there was a 20% discount, a price would be unaffordable for the vast majority of people.

Affordability has to be benchmarked against income. A teacher's pay is no different in Dún Laoghaoire than in Leitrim. The pay of a nurse, a council worker or a bus worker is not different because he or she happens to live in a different part of the country. Affordability has to be benchmarked against people's actual income but this Bill opens up the public land bank to develop housing that is linked to market conditions, private finance and to commercial imperatives around designated activity companies. We are not scaremongering when we say that this is the marketisation of the public land bank and an opening of the door to the privatisation of that landbank; it is there, in the Bill. Our amendments, which all work in conjunction with each other, aim to protect the public land bank against marketisation and to ensure that it is used solely to deliver public and genuinely affordable housing, with affordability benchmarked against people's income.