Victor Boyhan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister to the House. I am speaking to amendment No. 19. All 14 of the amendments I will be dealing with, which I will not go into now, are not mine but are the work of the Association of Irish Local Government. They are the result of engagement with the joint Oireachtas committee by members of the association, which represents all parties in this House. It is the work of members of the association. I acknowledge their enormous work and thank them and their executive for the amount of work they did in preparing these amendments. I have only undertaken to be a conduit for these amendments, but I happen to believe in them too. They are very important amendments. I will be pretty tight in my contributions today because I am very conscious of the time we have allotted to discuss this important legislation.

The rationale for amendment No. 19, which proposes to delete line 18 on page 9 and replace it with "so far as is necessary for the provision of social, affordable and cost rental housing and to achieve the purposes specified in this section", is to seek to restrict the LDA's ability to engage in commercial activities. While some involvement in the market can be beneficial in order to generate funding, it must be the case that these funds are funnelled straight back into the housing supply and the agency does not function as a revenue-generating project for the Exchequer. To this end, the agency's involvement in commercial activities must be in keeping with its mandate, which is, as the Minister knows, to provide social and affordable cost-rental housing.