Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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I am unsure whether I spoke to them and I made that point at the end of our previous meeting. Amendment No. 42 provides that the agency must be publicly owned and controlled. I want to emphasise this because one of the big problems with these agencies that are set up is that they are at one remove from direct control by elected representatives. Essentially, they become buffers against proper oversight. To be honest, I am sick to my back teeth of dealing with these entities, which are sort of State agencies. A councillor may attend a council meeting to try to find out what a body, a supposedly public body, is doing. Then he is told the council cannot give an answer because it is the responsibility of a given body and the council will see if it can get representatives in and get an answer from them. It is at one remove from real direct public control.

I have no doubt that is what will happen with the Land Development Agency, LDA. Theoretically, the council will still have a role. In reality, the LDA will be a law unto itself unless it is directly publicly controlled and unless there is direct public oversight over what is being done to develop public land.

Amendment No. 43 is next. We are including the term "relevant private". The reason for this is because, as we discussed previously, the LDA should not be acting in substitution for local authorities in the context of their responsibility for public land or for opening up such land to private interests. The agency should be doing the opposite. It should be grabbing relevant private land, including that which is being hoarded by private developers. I refer to vacant land that is being hoarded, being used for the purposes of speculation or that is simply unused and that could be used for housing. What the LDA should be doing is getting hold of such private land because it could be used to deliver much needed housing.

Amendment No. 49 provides that the definition of public housing should be housing that is operated by local authorities and approved housing bodies with differential rents. Again, this is critical because the Minister's definition of "affordability" is linked to market prices and rents rather than people's income or the cost of housing. That is not affordable at all. What we want in defining public housing is that anything built by the State on public land or anything that is being defined as affordable in any context should be affordable relative to people's incomes. Specifically, public housing must be based on the differential rent scheme.

Amendment No. 79 is next.