Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 1 June 2021

Select Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government

Land Development Agency Bill 2021: Committee Stage (Resumed)

Photo of Richard Boyd BarrettRichard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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I have made the point, so I will not labour it. It just shows a fundamental difference in approach. There is a lot of unutilised public land but, in my opinion and that of many members of the committee, that land is underutilised because central government has refused to give local authorities the money, resources and so on to develop public land. Rather than seeing the problem being addressed by allowing private finance in on public land, the problem would be addressed by the Government giving the resources and money to local authorities to build public and affordable housing on public land.

I take the point about semi-State land and so on and that it is something the agency could usefully do but, again, I think it should be transferred to local authorities. The big gap and problem is that property developers and land speculators and so on control too much of the land bank. They manipulate the market and land prices and so on and they drip-feed housing according to what makes the most money for them. They are fundamentally not interested in solving the housing crisis and, for the most part, they actually benefit from the housing crisis and from keeping suitable building land as a scarce resource that they control. That is what needs to be addressed and what this agency should be doing, but it is obvious that is not what the Government wants to do because it is dancing very significantly to the tune of the speculators and big property developers. We know the arguments and it is a fundamental difference of opinion.