Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

In respect of the witnesses' commentary on the tax bands and the allowances, I think the point at which one enters the top rate of tax in the revised figures is approximately €35,500. It has gone up slightly. That is essentially an alternative tax measure. It is quite valuable to discuss that versus other options. Would the witnesses like to outline or subsequently send us the details of what they would envisage? I think it is desirable that people do not fall into the higher rate as soon as they do in Ireland. It is a really big problem for young people taking up technical jobs, as I know from my experience of working with graduates. What would the witnesses envisage, for example, in terms of a three-year cycle? I would be flexible on it.

People enter the top tax bracket relatively early on, particularly when compared with the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland. This difficulty must be borne in mind.

I will make two points on housing. With regard to the construction industry, there has been total market failure in terms of access to credit for people in the construction sector who are not in the National Asset Management Agency, in other words, small and medium sized construction companies. A builder developing a block of ten apartments cannot build two apartments and then start to build another two units a couple of years later. Dr. McQuinn referred to market failure. In this case, there has been a market failure, although many of the builders concerned admittedly have impaired credit records for reasons with which we are all familiar. Do the witnesses have any proposals for addressing this issue?

Ireland has an extraordinary large number of empty houses, as recent figures from the Central Statistics Office have shown. While I am sure some of these houses are owned by elderly people living in nursing homes, this is a will-o'-the-wisp issue in the sense that there is never anything solid done about it. Has the ESRI or any other entity identified whether there are a large number of people with two homes? The Central Statistics Office specifically states that its figures on empty houses do not include holiday homes. Are there cases of people keeping one or two spare houses in case, for example, they have a row with someone and need to move out for a while? Intuitively, I would love to have an explanation of what precisely this is about. I understand that at any one time a number of people may be in hospital for short or long periods and others may be in nursing homes. If the witnesses do not have an explanation now, perhaps they will revert to the committee on the issue. If there is a stock of empty houses and the issue is, as the witnesses noted, one of supply, why can we not get at these houses?