Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

Land availability and pricing is the key to addressing our dysfunctional, rollercoaster housing system and, to our eternal cost, we have ignored and not implemented the Kenny report. The State should be heavily engaged in active land management and that means owning, controlling and releasing land for development in a sustainable and planned way. A recent National Economic and Social Council report, Urban Development Land, Housing and Infrastructure, Fixing Ireland's Broken System, highlighted how active land management in the Netherlands, Germany and Austria has worked in the public interest to limit land cost, improve affordability and prevent price shocks and housing shortages. It is a no-brainer.

We need urgent measures to deal with land hoarding and this Bill is welcome. The Bill has a similar approach to parts of our own Urban Regeneration and Housing (Amendment) Bill. This Bill also sought to eradicate anomalies created in the 2015 Acts that allowed landowners to avoid the vacant site levies. Our Bill ensured that the levy would apply to sites of any size that could accommodate housing, provide for a vacant site levy to be increased every year that the site remained on the register and provided for the repeal of subsections 16(2) and 16(3) of the principal Act which set down lower or zero rate levies depending on the size of the outstanding loans on the site.

This Bill is not radical and we have to ask ourselves what is radical. What is radical is putting housing affordability beyond the vast majority of people on ordinary incomes and that is what is happening. What was radical was not adopting the Kenny report. What is radical is selling off State assets to vulture funds. They are the real radical things that are happening. It is time that we did something in the common good and I believe that this Bill is going some way to doing that.

We have had housing shocks in every second decade and it is time we realised that what we do is creating the problem and we have to change our approach and that must address the issue of land affordability and availability. We know what needs to be done and it is time it was done. We will be supporting this Bill.

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