Mark Daly (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State to the House. This is the wrong plan at the wrong time. The man who told us the most about that is not anyone in this House or in the Dáil but President Clinton when he said in October 2011 that Ireland needs to solve its mortgage problem. We are not solving our mortgage problem. To bring in a property tax now without having solved the mortgage crisis, and it is a growing crisis, is a crazy move by any Government. We have 29% of borrowers in difficulty. They are either in arrears or have rearranged their loans. That means there are 450,000 people in mortgage difficulty and the amount involved is ¤15.1 billion. That problem is growing, although not as fast as it did in the past, but just because it has slowed down does not mean it is getting any better; it will get exponentially worse.

As the Minister is well aware, 400,000 tracker mortgages were taken out and tracker mortgages, which are linked to the European Central Bank rate, are as low as they could possibly be. As the Minister of State is aware also, the European Central Bank rate can only rise and if it goes up by 0.75%, and by another 1.5% over time, people will be shifting more of their income into paying mortgage debt. That is the ticking time bomb Ireland is facing. There is nothing surer than that it will happen. We have 400,000 people whose mortgages will suck more of their income from them and the knock-on effect of that on our economy is that more jobs will be lost, more shops will close, and less money will be spent in the economy.

It is crazy to bring in a property tax now knowing that we have a mortgage problem we have not addressed, affecting 29% of mortgages, to help those in distress at this time and knowing also that 400,000 people are on tracker mortgages which are guaranteed to cause more difficulty for the economy and put more people into arrears thereby causing more jobs to be lost in the wider economy because people are not spending money.