Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Government has had a year to come up with a vacant homes strategy and it has failed to do so. This was supposed to have been done months ago. The Finance Bill is going through and there is no mention of a vacant homes strategy. The three initiatives the Government has set in train for vacant homes are all welcome but they are minor. They target some 6,500 vacant homes over a period of six years, which is 3% of vacant houses in the State. It is not an adequate response to the crisis we are facing. I urge the Minister, his Department and the Government to wake up to the realities that are out there. Other actions need to be taken to deal with this issue. There are 183,000 vacant homes across the State and 35,293 in Dublin alone. However, there are 3,000 children and 5,000 adults in emergency accommodation. When will we take out the stick to incentivise people to put their homes back into use?

The Minister said we needed to look at the constitutional rights of property but there is no bar to us applying a tax on a category of homes, and I do not need to be the Attorney General to say this. We have a tax on the majority of homes in the form of the property tax, and prior to that we defined a certain category of homes, which were non-principal private residences, and applied a tax to them for a number of years. It is completely lawful to tax houses not occupied by the owner just as it was lawful to tax houses which nobody occupied.

There needs to be an incentive for individuals to put their vacant stock back into use and a number of schemes can assist them in this but as it is not happening fast enough, we need a vacant home tax. It should apply to houses vacant for six months or more within local electoral areas, LEAs, in which there is a high level of housing need and a high level of vacancy. It would have to include exemptions for holiday homes, homes in probate, fair deal homes and so forth but it is not beyond our ability to design a scheme. The rate would need to increase year on year. The site tax is a similar idea to get vacant sites into use. We are critical of the site tax the Government introduced as it left it too long, the lead-in period was too long and the rates were too low but it does increase, thereby giving an incentive to people. Getting sites into use would be very welcome but the turnaround time would be long. Even if an owner sold a site to a developer today, there would be a two-year lead-in period before somebody turned the key in the door.

We accept that a cohort of the 35,000 vacant properties in Dublin will not be suitable to be brought back into public or private use but a large proportion are suitable. We need to introduce measures now as this is an emergency. The Minister said he would come up with a report but he has already failed to meet his own targets. Considering these matters without any clear commitments is not good enough. I stay in a hotel in Dublin while I am here and every day I come into work I pass people who stay in the same hotel. Every day, they get their kids ready for school, put their uniforms on and take two or three buses to get to their primary or secondary school. What we have done to people in this State is horrible.

We cannot fix that overnight but this finance committee can bring in measures that would provide some light and comfort for those families. We were elected to have the power to introduce a vacant homes tax and to encourage the 183,000 owners of those homes to bring them back into use. Why are we not doing it? I cannot, for the life of me, understand that. The Minister needs to give me a good reason for not introducing a vacant home tax now. This is not day one of the crisis - it has been going on for years. The Minister has not given me a reason for it. All the amendment seeks is a report. It states: "The Minister shall within 6 months of the passing of this Act, prepare and lay before Dáil Éireann a report on the introduction of a vacant home tax." It does not even commit the Minister to introducing a vacant home tax but it tries to force the Government to bring forward a report on the vacant tax for Members to have an informed discussion on the subject.

I would prefer the Minister of Finance to go further and say he will not tolerate 8,000 of our citizens being in emergency accommodation, or people dying on the steps of this building. He needs to send a clear message to landlords who are hoarding empty properties that, if they do so any longer, we will tax them. This tax should increase if they do not bring their properties into use within one year and there should be another increase after two years. This is an emergency and it requires emergency measures but nothing of this type is coming from the Minister. The Minister should send this message not just for the benefit of landlords, but for those who find themselves homeless in this State.