Damien English (Meath West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank Senator Boyhan for bring a focus to this issue. It is exactly what we were trying to achieve here. We are able to use the State-owned landbank to deliver housing across the three categories of social, affordable and private.

We have asked local authorities to bring forward all their plans on how to activate and develop those sites. They have been doing that and we have been working through those plans with them over the past couple of months. Our housing delivery team - I and the Minister, Deputy Eoghan Murphy, and an officer in the Department, Mr. Peter Gavican - has been visiting all the local authorities and going through all their options, sites and landbanks, trying to work out solutions on how to activate that land. This funding will be concentrated on publicly owned lands and on local authority-backed projects to deliver affordable housing and other projects of housing, such as activation measures. We are clear what the funding is for.

Even at the start, LIHAF was for activating land. Land was not being activated and houses were not being built.

The additional tranche of funding of LIHAF is working and is bringing forward projects. The new funding will bring forward more projects with a greater focus on State-owned land.

Already, we have 13,500 going through the process of a pipeline of social housing projections on 820 sites but there is enough land ideally placed in State ownership to deliver 30,000 houses. We will concentrate on that as well as working on additional lands for more housing projects as well. We want to activate our land.

I hear commentary that there are 120,000 sites belonging to the State. That is an exaggerated number. We do not own the lands that NAMA has. We are in control of the loan book, through NAMA, but the State does not own the land and is not in control of what happens that land. Naturally, through NAMA, we are in control of what happens its loans and work through that as well. I want to be clear on that. When I hear this figure of 120,000 sites, often the land includes parkland and every other kind of land. However, we are concentrating on land for housing that we own and we will bring that forward.

We are in this space and the fund will be open for calls next week. Prior to that, local authorities had been told, for the past year or year and a half, to work with the Department to bring forward proposals on these lands anyway. These proposals are at an advanced stage. We will match the funding as well.

In relation to the last comment the Senator made about the aggregation scheme and sites that were not brought into it, we have been clear to local authorities that the best way to get their money back on those sites is to activate them - to build houses on them and draw down their funding on the housing projects. That is what we are trying to do here. Concentration on activity is how best to deal with that as well.