Pearse Doherty (Donegal South West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I spoke on the potential dangers of this scheme on Second Stage. My understanding is that if one owns a Georgian house in Limerick that fits the criteria specified by the legislation in terms of a Georgian house and one lives in the first and second floors of the house and have a business in the basement and on the first floor one can spend substantial sums upgrading the house and get 100% tax relief on the upgrade, depending on having a taxable income to offset it over a period of ten years. I have a number of concerns. People will get their property tax letters next week. As I said on Second Stage, there are less affluent areas of Limerick and people in these areas do not get any relief for upgrading their houses or for works they deem fit to bring up the standard of their house. However, the owner of a Georgian house will be able to avail of this relief. I question the fairness of this relief.

On a main street one could have a Georgian house and an adjacent property that is not a Georgian house that are in competition to rent out the ground floor as office or retail space. From my reading of the section, it allows the owner of the Georgian house to upgrade the ground floor office or retail space of the house as long as he or she is living in the upper two stories and this gives an additional incentive to businesses to locate in Georgian properties. I am quite concerned that houses other than Georgian houses will find it more difficult to attract the same type of business to their property.

I acknowledge that it is a pilot scheme, but it offers significant relief to the owners of Georgian properties. It walks, talks and looks like a section 23 scheme, which in my view was not a very good scheme introduced by the previous Government. I have serious reservations about it.