Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail)
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I welcome everybody. We have frequent interaction on the housing committee so I have an opportunity there to talk about delivery. I thank the witnesses for some of the answers that we have got in that regard.

The Committee of Public Accounts gives us an opportunity to look back at historic spending and it is always concerned about making recommendations about how we can do that better and where things went wrong. The land aggregation scheme, LAG, is a really good example of what many people have called that decade of undersupply in housing. Where a resource was available to the State, over a ten-year period an incredibly insufficient number of homes were built in general, but there was no significant delivery on sites at all on this scheme specifically on the land that was taken. I admit that many of the witnesses may not have been there but I want to parse that period to see what lessons we can learn from it.

The first area of error is the acquisition of the sites themselves by the local authorities. Could Mr. Jordan indicate if any review was done when the sites were acquired or any rationale provided by the local authorities as to why the sites were purchased on an individual site-by-site basis?