Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Let me assure the Minister of State that we are not in any way being cynical for the sake of it. It is because the crisis we face is so serious and is set to get worse unless radical action is taken.

The point I made and, as far as I am concerned, the point of this amendment is that if the local authorities are forced to levy themselves because they have not developed a particular site for social housing purposes, because they do not have the funding and they are not guaranteed the funding to develop that site from central government, they will have no choice - there will be at least significant pressure - but to sell that site or enter into public private partnerships, effectively privatising it or requiring some significant trade-off where public land is given over to private developers. That is back-door pressure for privatisation and it is the wrong way to go.

I might be a little less anxious about this levy if the Minister of State stated that if a local authority came forward with a plan to develop any of its land, no matter how big those plans are and no matter how many of them there are, the Government would guarantee that the local authority would get the funding to develop those sites. For example, in my area there are 5,000 applicants on the housing list and if Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown came forward next year and stated it would build 5,000 houses on the land it has available, the Minister of State would give it the funding. However, in the absence of such a guarantee, which I do not believe the Minister of State will give, this is, at best, tokenism and, at worse, a pressure to privatise.

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