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

The market had collapsed. Some of us at the time were saying that NAMA should have behaved differently. This might indeed explain the mystery of a case I brought up with the Minister for Finance earlier. It related to apartments in Sandyford. In that case, NAMA was sitting on empty properties and then sold them to a vulture fund. The vulture fund then sat on the empty properties while there were homeless people all around. It is a mystery. Why was this happening? Perhaps it was for precisely this reason: the decision was to simply sit on the property and let the value go up. Then, the owners would walk away with a vast capital gain and pay no tax on it.

The Government is not moving immediately to close that down and is allowing it to play out. I suspect that is because the then Minister, Deputy Noonan, said it was guaranteed and that the Government would not do anything. It is a little like what I suspect also happened with Apple – we will move on to that discussion later. In those critical years of 2013 and 2014, a great deal of running around was done by the then Minister. He was talking to big corporations and property investors and telling them that the Government would look after them on the tax front. These funds moved in and the consequences have been disastrous.

The Government has somewhat belatedly acknowledged this by making some moves to close down the loophole. However, it seems to be extending it for one year because of some sort of principle of honour or because we have to honour the deal with these vulture funds. The Government should forget it. We should close it down now, recognise that we made a big mistake and recover whatever ground and revenues we can. We should close down the incentive for these people to continue immorally and obscenely hoarding land and property when thousands of our citizens need places to live.