Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Chair and the two committee members who very kindly allowed me skip them in the queue to speak because I have to leave at 11.05 a.m. I have three questions and they concern the local property tax; Traveller accommodation; and the question of local government capital income, particularly with regard to housing. By their nature, these questions are probably more for Mr. Geoghegan and his colleagues from the Association of Irish Local Government.

I will start with the question of the local property tax. I believe this to be an unjust tax; a tax on the family home. When it was first introduced we were told that it would go towards funding local services but this was a con trick. While 80% goes to local services, central Government funding for these services has been cut so badly that the local property tax revenue is, in reality, just replacing lost income and communities have not benefited from better services as a result. I note a particular paragraph in Mr. Geoghegan's paper which I will now read out for the committee:

The issue of using 2014 as the ongoing base-line to determine the current element of local property tax payable to our member authorities needs to change with immediate effect and this base-line needs to be increased dramatically to ensure that local authorities have sufficient general funding available to them.

I read that as a call for a big increase in the local property tax, and I remind the AILG that this tax is a contested tax. The household charge that went before it was not paid by 50% of the population, a level of opposition similar in scale to that against the water charges. It was only when jackboot tactics were used and the Revenue Commissioners were put in charge of collection that opposition was driven back, only to later feed back into the water charges campaign. If major increases in the local property tax are coming up either in 2019 or indeed further down the line, based on higher property prices in a housing bubble as opposed to a depressed market in 2013, all I can say is that the political establishment should remember that this was and is a contested tax and will remain so in the future. This could be a major issue, particularly if large increases are sought. I wish to put that on the record.

My next question concerns Traveller accommodation. I have here an article that appeared in The Irish Times on 14 September, the headline of which runs: Traveller housing targets have not been met in 18 years. The article reports that there are 1500 Traveller families living in overcrowded conditions in the State; that funding for Traveller accommodation, which stood at €171 million euro between 2005 and 2008, dipped to €34 million last year; that only 70% of the units targeted have actually been provided; and, incredibly, that more than €55 million of monies allocated for Traveller accommodation since 2000 remains unspent. Why is that?

On the question of local government capital income, I find the figures here to be earth shattering. In 2008, local authorities received capital income grants from the State of €5.5 billion euro but by 2015 that had been cut to €1.3 billion. In other words, then, every €4 or more of this funding received by local authorities from central Government was cut back to less than a euro. This is not just a cut - it is a massive cut, the impact of which can be seen on housing in particular. We heard on "Morning Ireland" this morning of the latest report from Threshold on how landlords are using the refurbishment legal loophole to evict tenants and hike up rents, thus putting even more pressure on the local authorities. This is an absolute scandal. If these cuts were reversed we would be able to build public housing on public land and put a major dent in the housing crisis. A total of 9,000 local authority homes were build in 1975; 75 were built in 2015; 142 were built in 2016. These cuts must be reversed and I ask the witnesses to comment on this.