Since August 1999, when the provisions of the Bill in relation to social and affordable housing were made known, the Irish House Builders' Association has made clear its outright opposition to the plans. Indeed, a number of suggestions were made about the constitutionality of the measures and had the President, Mrs McAleese, not referred part five of the Bill to the Supreme Court, a constitutional challenge was expected. This cannot now take place, given that the Supreme Court has now ruled on the relevant section.
Yesterday, faced with the inevitability of the measures being signed into law, Mr Ciaran Ryan, director of the IHBA, insisted that the builders would be seeking to recoup their costs in relation to the scheme. This would be achieved by passing on extra charges to house buyers in the 80 per cent of the schemes remaining to private purchasers.
Mr Ryan said that the result would be to push up the cost of private houses while diverting resources to the public sector. The crucial aspect of the current housing crisis was the supply of houses and apartments. The proposals to introduce social and affordable housing as a condition of planning permissions would not add one new house to that supply, he claimed.
Conversely, the costs of providing social housing, or land for social housing, would put up the costs of private housing.
However, the claims of the builders in relation to the Planning and Development Bill have been consistently rejected by the Minister for the Environment, Mr Dempsey, who said that prices in the current sellers' market were being determined by how much the builder could get on the market and bore no relation to the costs of providing a house.
According to the Minister, "there is no evidence that the price of houses is in any way being kept at a reasonable price by the members of the IHBA in the absence of the proposed measures".
On the other hand, the Minister insisted that the proposals in the Planning Bill should moderate the huge increase in the value of land that is conferred by zoning for residential development, because developers would have to factor the requirement to reserve a quota at existing-use value into what they were prepared to pay for the land.
There are some examples of this being tried before - and working - in a number of European countries. In Britain, for example, a similar formula is already used to include a percentage of social housing and has been used for almost a decade.
Each borough council decides on its social and affordable housing requirements and sets a quota. This can range from 25 per cent in the Greater London area to almost zero in parts of Scotland and northern England, where under rules which provide for developers handing over land to the council, housing lists have been greatly reduced.
In deciding that part five of the Planning and Development Bill was constitutional, the Supreme Court sided with the Minister, finding, in effect, that the greater social good outweighed the protection of the private property rights of a few.
But not only did the court decide that the Bill addressed issues of the greater good, it held that it should address the greater good, given the serious nature of current the housing crisis.
The court also recognised the provision in the Bill that "in so far as possible housing developments of this nature are not isolated from the general community".
The court might also have added that there is little evidence of the IHBA seeking to promote social inclusion through any of the high-profile schemes which have seen individual new houses sell for more than £1 million. The IHBA, in turn, may argue that the promotion of social inclusion is not its primary purpose, but it is generally accepted that it should be done and in this regard the Government is merely carrying out good social policy.