Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I want to have a housing market in which first-time and any other individual buyers have a chance to buy a home at an affordable level, but there is another side to the coin.

REITs allowed us, in particular at a time of great economic difficulty, to get to a point where we had professionalised our rental sector to a greater extent. That means rental accommodation being provided in our country that is different to where we have been historically, which has tended to be one individual with one or two rental properties, the aggregate of which was equal to the Irish rental sector. That is precisely one of the reasons we got into such difficulty in the rental market. We had so many people providing rental accommodation who were not able to cope with the pressures the economy was under then. There is a role for institutional companies to provide rental accommodation within our country. If the Deputy has concerns regarding the quantity of them or the work they do, I will be happy to hear his views in the context of the Finance Bill. However, they play and have played an important role in providing rental accommodation in Ireland.