Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I wish to add my voice of opposition to what the Government is doing. The Minister of State has rightly taken us back to when the market was bottomed out in 2013. However, the strategy that the Government adopted at that point has turned out to be a disastrous folly. The theory was that by giving vast tax breaks to these investors, we would do something positive for the market. What we actually did was hand over vast wealth to these vulture funds.

It was obviously a concerted strategy. In fact, the then Minister for Finance, Deputy Noonan, was straight-up about it. We now know he was busy meeting representatives from all these funds and actively encouraging them to come in. No doubt, he was telling them they would get favourable tax treatment and that they would walk away paying no tax on the capital gains, which, we now know, are absolutely astronomical. Even then, it would not have taken a rocket scientist to know that when the market was bottomed out these people were going to gain in a major way. There was only one way the market was going to go at that stage, namely, up.