Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

That is a fair question. Rebuilding Ireland's core objective is to increase and accelerate housing delivery to meet demand.

In the context of State lands, that means extracting the optimum housing supply in the shortest possible timeframe, while also securing the greatest value for money possible in terms of State-owned assets. In practical terms, this will include accelerating social housing delivery and securing more homes for sale and rent at lower and more affordable price points.

Many local authorities have significant landbanks and are pivotal in managing the overall planning and development of housing to meet the needs of citizens. It is not my intention to direct local authorities on how to maximise the housing supply from their sites but, rather, to work with them in partnership, using all of the levers available to me, to support the development of housing on such sites.

In this regard, Rebuilding Ireland contains a number of key actions that are capable of supporting the accelerated delivery of mixed-tenure housing from local authority sites. These include the commitment to spend over €5 billion on adding a significant number of social housing units to our existing stock, the €200 million local infrastructure housing activation fund and the major urban housing development sites initiative, which involves some local authority-owned and private sites. I hope we will get significant and ambitious public private partnerships in order to get mixed-tenure sites moving. This will be done on a case-by-case basis.

In principle, we have agreed politically on O'Devaney Gardens. We want to bring finance to the project to support 30% social housing. We also want Dublin City Council to try to design a system that can attract significant private sector interest in the site and to use the land that is available, which is the key to ensuring that the council receives as much of a dividend as possible from the private developer. It may be a social as well as a financial dividend, or one or other, in terms of the 20% affordable rental element of the project that we envisage.

Depending on the location and value of a site, the last thing we want are large sites remaining empty for five or six years when the current pressures on supply continue. We are encouraging the chief executives of local authorities to be ambitious and to come to us with projects that we will help them put together.

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