In 1997 I bought a fifth of an acre site in Dublin for £150,000. In 2004, I bought another fifth of an acre site, again in Dublin, but this time it cost €4.8 million. In seven years, the price of development land in our capital city had increased more than thirtyfold. But unfortunately, this increase in a short space of time was nothing new. Overvalued development land has been having a detrimental effect on how we supply housing in Ireland for over half a century.

In 1973, Justice John Kenny’s report on the price of building land was published. Commissioned in 1971, following a massive increase in the price of building land throughout the 1960s, the report’s main objective was to consider measures for controlling the price of land required for housing and other forms of development.