Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I will stick to discussing the Bill and the amendments in question. For four decades, housing policy expert after housing policy expert has been calling for an active land management agency, a strong State agency with a significant budget and comprehensive CPO powers. The job of that agency would be to amass land holdings and, working in partnership with the appropriate State agency, assist those being developed. That is what we should be debating here today. Unfortunately, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, as parts of government after government, have refused to do that. The reasons are unclear but that is the central flaw of this Bill. The problem is that because the Government is also ensuring that this land management agency, weak as it is, will also be a commercial residential developer, the LDA cannot have strong CPO powers, cannot be involved in active land management as is required in this State and therefore does not fulfil the central demand of the NESC for such an agency or for other agencies.

This agency is usurping our local authorities because what we will see, as has happened in St. Teresa's Gardens in Dublin city, is that rather than funding a local authority to do a large social and affordable housing development, the responsibility will be transferred to the LDA. In fact, all local authorities will be left doing is small volumes of social housing, nowhere close to the volumes that are needed, and affordable rental units and houses for affordable sale will be left to the LDA.

The level of capitalisation the Minister is talking about is embarrassingly small. Spending €1.25 billion and borrowing another €1.25 billion would not even be enough expenditure to deliver appropriate volumes of social and affordable housing in a single year, let alone over the lifetime of the Bill. This Bill will not do what Deputy McAuliffe said it will do. It is not going to provide the homes that people who vote for him, me, the Minister and others urgently require. We will not see a single LDA home until 2023 and will not even hit 1,000 homes until after 2025. That is the reason we are opposed to the Bill and we want the Government to stop talking about housing and fund our local authorities to build tens of thousands of social and affordable homes annually. That is not what is currently on offer.

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