Conor Skehan expresses concern about Land Development Agency

The former chairman of the Housing Agency, Conor Skehan has expressed serious concern about the proposed Land Development Agency.

Previous development agencies have either worked well or ended “spectacularly badly” he told Newstalk Breakfast.

The Land Development Agency will buy private land adjoining existing prime sites held by State and semi-State organisations in order to assemble land holdings that will then be developed for housing.

The Docks Authority “lost the run of itself”, Mr Skehan said, while Nama and the rail procurement agency had both operated well. He admitted that he had been wrong in is initial assessment of Nama.

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Mr Skehan urged the Government to address the issue of arrears, pointing out that there are 14,000 homes in the country in serious arrears which meant “that’s 38,000 humans in trouble”.

There were a further 120,000 restructured mortgages, he added, many of which were in difficulty.

If he had the budget of the Land Development Agency he would “go off and buy a couple hundred thousand houses” and use them to address the housing crisis.

Ireland has the most centrist form of Government in Europe, he claimed, which makes it “unresponsive and exceptionally slow.”

The Land Development Agency would try to get people to live where they (the agency) thinks they should live and not where they want to live, said Mr Skehan.

He urged the Government to make the new agency a procurement agency and not to get into building “as that’s where it would start to fail” he warned. Development was a very difficult business with huge risk. The Government could end up “losing its shirt” and could distort local markets.

“The Government could do incredible harm.”

Meanwhile, Sinn Féin’s housing spokesperson Eoin Ó Broin has repeated his call for the resignation of Minister for Housing Eoghan Murphy, following his threat to use emergency powers to strip certain local authorities of their powers to provide emergency accommodation.

Mr Ó Broin told RTE’s Morning Ireland that the minister’s threat that his department would instead take over responsibility was a “distraction” and an attempt to deflect blame onto local authorities for his Government’s failings.