The Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers’ Association (ICMSA) has said that it can “practically guarantee” legal challenges to apparent political proposals to use compulsory purchase orders (CPO) on farmland.
Pat McCormack, the association’s president, said that, according to some reports, talks between Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil on forming a government coalition have included a proposal to adopt some version of a recommendation from a 1973 report.
The 1973 report by Judge John Kenny recommended that it should be possible for local authorities or government agencies to ‘CPO’ farmland for house building, by paying the landowner agricultural value plus a 25% “top-up”.
The idea of compulsory purchase of farmland for house building that involved systematic and deliberate underpayment for the land in question is more akin to confiscation than public policy.
McCormack posed the question whether other sectors in the housing supply-chain were also going to have their margins “limited by legislation”, including builders, solicitors, auctioneers, lending institutions and contractors.
“Do they all get to charge the market rate while just the farmer-landowner has their price set by legislation,” the ICMSA president commented.
“It seems to us that the housing crisis in Dublin, Cork and the other cities is a function of the completely lop-sided development strategies adopted by successive governments that pours the employers, jobs and infrastructure into existing urban and semi-urban locations,” he argued.
The obvious answer is to put the development and jobs into those areas where supply of houses outstrips demand and people could buy houses for affordable sums – but that would involve a degree of long-term planning and admissions of failure that some of our politicians seem unwilling to make.
“Let me make this as clear as the situation demands: you cannot have a situation where a local authority or government agency can CPO farmland at a price less than its market value,” McCormack continued.
He claimed: “The idea that an arm of the state can force me to sell my land and then deliberately underpay me for that land is not public policy; it is arbitrary state confiscation and would have more in common with dictatorships than it would with a democratic state governed by a constitution.
What, for instance, happens where the state CPOs a farmer’s land for housing and systematically underpays him or her, but then concludes the kind of ‘sweetheart’ deal with a private developer that some local authorities so controversially do.
“Does the house builder reduce their margin by the same rate as was imposed on the farmer? Do the local authority or lending institution reduce their interest rate or rent by the same proportion?” McCormack asked.
“If that’s not the case and they all keep or indeed increase their margins – as we suspect would be the case – then it’s the landowner who is subsiding everyone else in the housing supply chain in exactly the same way as the farmers subsidise everyone else in the food supply chain,” he argued.
McCormack concluded: “This is a bad and dangerous idea that is certainly an injustice to individual rights and very probably illegal. I guarantee a succession of legal challenges.”