Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

Can I have a simple answer, please? Is the Government committing to having zero private, open market houses built on all of the LDA sites? If that is the case, I will welcome it but I do not think it is the case and I will be very surprised if it is. That is the only way the Minister of State can say the Government will build public homes on public land. Even within the framework of the programme for Government, the Government talks about providing homes for affordable purchase through the LDA, in other words, selling off housing on public land. Useful information was published recently by Orla Hegarty outlining that the cheapest way by far to provide housing to address the public housing crisis is for the State to do it on public land. It costs less than €250,000 to build quality homes on public land versus a much higher cost of giving the public land to private developers and then buying a portion of that back to be used as social housing.

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