Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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I want to respond to the Minister's claim that delivery could not be more public than it is. We need to put this in a concrete context. At the moment, in my area there is virtually no public housing being developed. The local authority build for this year for the Dún Laoghaire area is zero. All of a sudden and out of the blue, notice was given of allocations from the council list to a private development that the elected representatives had no idea was going to be allocated for social housing, although always through approved housing bodies and not as direct council housing. Out of the blue, this popped up and none of the elected representatives had known about it. Why is that? It is because the development was built privately and behind the scenes there is commercial negotiation is going on. Once that commercial element is brought in, oversight and democracy go out the window. This is what is going to happen with the public land bank through the Land Development Agency. Everything will be about commercial negotiations and negotiations with financiers and the elected representatives of local authorities will not have direct input or knowledge of what is going to happen, when it is going to happen or how it is going to happen until it is a done deal and a fait accompli.

The idea that the Comptroller and Auditor General and the Committee of Public Accounts will be able to drill down into the details of developments on particular sites in the multiple local authority areas is nonsense. The people who potentially could have oversight and real input and serve the public interest at a local level are the elected representatives of the local authorities. That will all go out the window. They are going to be at more than one remove in respect of many of the key decisions that will be made about the development of the public land banks in their areas. It is for this reason I am stressing in the amendment that housing has to be publicly owned and controlled. What this Bill does is supplant the role of local authorities and bring in people who are operating largely to a private commercial agenda. Deputy Cian O'Callaghan is correct that there is no justification for building full market price housing on public land. It is outrageous. What we should be doing is further encroaching on the dominance of the private sector over the housing market. The Government, through the Land Development Agency, is expanding the influence of the private and commercial sector into the public land bank.