Shane Cassells (Meath West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The Rebuilding Ireland programme has some very ambitious targets for providing homes by county councils this year and in future years. A very basic commodity must exist in order to achieve real traction in tackling the crisis and building homes for people, namely, land. I rarely hear speakers mention the word "land" in debates only people roaring and shouting that they want houses. They must think they are built on thin air because I do not hear people talk about that very basic commodity of land. In County Meath, bar one landlocked piece of land, we have no publicly owned land and consequently we cannot build council housing estates. I asked the Secretary General of the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government, Mr. John McCarthy, about that at the Committee of Public Accounts two weeks ago and he said the Department would not get into the business of funding the buying of land. If we do not have publicly owned land, where the housing crisis is at its worst, and we do not intend to buy it so that we can build on it, is it not the case that the problem will only get worse?

What are the Minister's thoughts on how we can help those people in commuter counties such as Meath where there is no publicly owned land?

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