Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

This Government acts very strangely at times. There are a number of items which have been on the legislative programme for a long time, some of which are concerned with property rights, which the Government, perhaps because of an ongoing dispute between the two parties, is unable to address. For example, the Labour Party has been calling for the abolition of ground rents for some time. This Bill deals with property rights but it does not deal with the ground rents issue.

Another more important issue that has not been dealt with is the price of land for schools. When a local authority rezones land for housing purposes, developers benefit by tens of millions of euro through the automatic, follow-on rezoning of sites for schools. The Minister, as a former Minister for Education and Science, knows the extraordinary failure of the Government to take on land speculators regarding the enormous increase in the cost of sites for both houses and schools. School sites in Dublin now cost at least €1 million per acre and this is probably also true of the Cork area.

However, while the Government is aware of this crisis and school groups and communities have often protested outside Leinster House on the issue, this Administration cannot exercise any urgency in dealing with it. We have instead been presented so quickly with a Bill that when I sought advice on it, the only similar emergency legislation some of those to whom I spoke could recall was the Offences Against the State Act which was passed overnight in very different circumstances in 1985. It granted the power to seize identified funds held by the IRA in bank accounts to prevent that organisation from withdrawing moneys at a moment's notice.

IDA Ireland owns approximately 700 commercial properties and the deal to which the Minister referred concerns one property in Clonshaugh in north Dublin. He informed the House that the purpose of the Bill is to protect the interest that the State holds in property acquired for industrial development purposes by IDA Ireland, Shannon Development and Údarás na Gaeltachta. This is another emergency Bill but it is very different from the British-Irish Agreement (Amendment) Act, which was introduced in a similar cloak and dagger fashion two weeks ago. There is no reference in the explanatory memorandum to a possible technical defect giving rise to this Bill. There was a technical defect in the original British-Irish Agreement legislation concerning Waterways Ireland, which is why the Labour Party supported the emergency amending legislation. It was clear that the Government had intended that the original Act would treat North-South bodies as State authorities for the purposes of landlord and tenant law. It had not achieved its intention because of a drafting error. We supported that Bill because it was intended to restore what everyone understood to be the status quo ante.

Members of the Houses have not been given any explanation about a mistake in the original drafting of the 1978 ground rents legislation. No one could ever reasonably have assumed that IDA Ireland, Údarás na Gaeltachta and the Shannon Free Airport Development Company had, or were ever intended to have, the benefits of State authority status under that Act. No one could have believed that IDA Ireland was a Minister or an authority in the now defunct Land Commission or the Office of Public Works. What is being attempted is a surreptitious amendment to substantive law to correct the case to which the Minister referred. Added to this, the Bill confers substantial new and additional benefits and perhaps it is correct to do so. However, the manner of the Bill's introduction has not afforded Deputies the opportunity to consult or discuss the merits of conferring these additional benefits. As Deputy Pat Breen said, all Members support IDA Ireland and want to see its status and position protected but we have not been given the opportunity to tease out the substantial additional rights conferred by this Bill.

Policy issues are involved that deserve greater consideration. The Labour Party opposes ground rents and would support any mechanism for their abolition. They are an unnecessary and anachronistic relic of bygone times and serve only to act as an irritating obstruction to the otherwise complete capacity to sell, bequeath and dispose of domestic property. It is only ground rents we are talking about, not normal arms' length commercial leases. The 1978 Act creates a right to buy out the landlord's freehold interest where one of a small number of alternative conditions set out in the Act is satisfied. The most generally relevant condition is that the lease is for not less than 50 years and the annual rent is for less than the annual rateable valuation of the property. At a briefing this morning, I understood it is IDA policy to grant 99-year or 999-year leases. How many multinationals could conceivably enjoy the benefits of that sort of tenancy agreement? The agreements covered in the 1978 Act apply to domestic dwellings.

There are a number of constitutional questions. The sole purpose served in introducing this Bill without notice and seeking to have it enacted in one day is to prevent any person paying ground rent to an industrial development body from escaping the application of this measure by serving a notice of intention to acquire the fee simple of his or her property. Has the Attorney General advised whether the statutory entitlement created by the 1978 Act, the right of a property owner, including a domestic property owner, to enlarge his or her interest in that property, is not to be characterised for constitutional purposes as being a property right and so protected from arbitrary interference? Has the Supreme Court judgment on the Health (Amendment) Bill been taken into account?

I call attention to what the current authors of the late Professor Kelly's textbook, The Irish Constitution, say:

If a statute without little self-evident justification were to exempt the State from legislation regulating ordinary private rights and duties — such as, for example, the landlord and tenant Acts — then its constitutionality would surely be open to question in the light of the specific reservation to this effect contained in Mrs Justice Denham's judgment.

I am not a lawyer but this is precisely the sort of legislation we are being asked to pass today as speedily as possible and without any opportunity to consider the justification of extending the exemptions from ground rent legislation to include bodies such as IDA Ireland. To be honest, the Minister is leaning on the good will of the different parties in the House who, without exception, are in favour of protecting the interests of the agency. However, we are not lawyers, were not elected as such and have had no time to consult on the matter. This is a bad principle. This is the second time in three weeks that the Government has introduced legislation in a rushed manner to the House.

The Bill will also create another distinction, possibly arbitrary and unjustified, between those tenants who may have commenced the procedure to enlarge their interest before the enactment of this legislation and those who discover today that such an avenue is being shut off. Is that discrimination constitutional? The impression is being given, with which I agree, that we are trying to block a loophole which was found by some clever lawyers who are either property owners or advisers to property owners.

Another question arises. IDA Ireland receives significant amounts of State money, the State spends fortunes on lawyers' fees and the Attorney General has a very well staffed office. If this was a problem, why was it not noticed? Has the Attorney General conducted a review of similar owners of property who are State-subsidised or State-sponsored bodies in some way, for example, vocational education committees, county councils and so on? Is this provision simply a result of diligence on the part of civil servants in the Department, which would be to their credit, or is it a general point on which the Attorney General has advised? We need information in that regard.

Will section 70 of the 1980 Landlord and Tenant (Amendment) Act, a subsequent provision which modifies the general exemption of State authorities and creates a right to buy out the fee simple in the case of dwelling houses, subject to the right of a State authority to prevent alienation of property where it considers that the public interest so requires, also apply to these three bodies? Deputies on all sides of the House would be familiar with cases where people acquired property from the State as a result, for example, of being in the employment of the State as soldiers and so on. Have the ramifications of this legislation been checked out and has the Attorney General done a thorough review? If the answer is "No", one of the three listed bodies will be able to block a tenant from acquiring the fee simple in a dwelling house if it certifies that it is satisfied that such acquisition would not be in the public interest. What precisely does this mean? Is the public interest equivalent to that of the body? Is the maintenance of a body's property portfolio in the public interest? If so, does it outweigh the importance of the public interest in the effective operation of socially progressive legislation designed to relieve the population from the remnants of an outmoded property interest?

I point this out as a member of the Labour Party because in 1973 when I was a student, Dublin was still reeling from the housing crisis as a consequence of houses falling down in the 1960s. The then Labour Minister for Local Government, Jimmy Tully, gave local authority tenants the right to buy out their houses. This was fundamental reform for the country which has benefited local authority tenants everywhere. We have a progressive attitude here that where people have a long-standing tenancy, particularly in a private dwelling house, they build up and acquire rights to acquire the property. I am not challenging the Minister's concern with regard to the bodies, such as the IDA, which fall within his remit and his desire to protect their interests, but what ramifications does this have with regard to rights to acquire property in a socially progressive manner from the State in certain circumstances? Have the ramifications been examined?

Although this Bill is very short, introducing such legislation at the last minute means it could go wrong. I am sure the Minister has not forgotten the Department of Health and Children to the extent that he cannot remember the recent legislation which was introduced, the Health (Amendment)(No.2) Bill 2004, which was intended to plug the ongoing exposure of up to €2 billion as a result of the nursing home situation. That was bells-ringing emergency legislation, but despite that, it was still presented to the House on a Monday and debated on the following Thursday and Friday. If the Minister has been aware of this problem and his Department clearly has been for some time, it is not good enough to give the House just a few hours in which to consider it.

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