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

I did. As I said yesterday, notwithstanding the Minister's replies the decision to invite these vulture funds, investment vehicles and property speculators into this country, supposedly to assist the housing sector, will, when the history books are written, turn out to be the most disastrous decision ever taken. Frankly, it is the biggest heist on the Irish people and has contributed to one of the worst housing crises we have ever faced.

The Minister maintains they are necessary because the State cannot do it all. That was essentially the tenor of his response. He contends that if we do not have them, we will not have the capital. I still completely fail to see what benefit they have added. We are talking about the big investment firms, wealth asset management companies or whatever they like to call themselves. What they deliver is mostly apartments nobody can afford. These are developments where the rents or prices are absolutely astronomical and completely beyond the reach of the vast majority of people. Take Cherrywood for example. I think €15 million from the local infrastructure housing activation fund, LIHAF, went into putting in the infrastructure there. It is one of the biggest residential developments in the State, if not the biggest. Years on from that we still do not know what affordable housing we are going to get back in Cherrywood. We are getting nothing from these people. What we do get, we get at a vast cost, far in excess of anything we would have paid if we had provided this directly on lands, taking Cherrywood as an example, which we actually had in our possession. These were NAMA lands. We gave them to the funds. They built completely overpriced stuff. They lease a little bit back to us at astronomical cost. We still do not know how much affordable housing we are going to get and the stuff they are selling or renting on the open market will be completely beyond affordable for the vast majority of people. Where is the benefit from this? There is none. They control the market and charge astronomical rents.

I will give another example. It is one I have been banging on about for four years. It is a multi-unit complex across the road from me. It was originally bought out by Apollo Global Management, a wealth asset management company based in the US. Its first move was to try to increase the rent by 60%. Its next move was to try to mass-evict everybody in the place when it could not get away with that. Then it flipped the complex to another vulture fund, a domestic one, which has now succeeded in mass-evicting the tenants. That fund has left quite a lot of the property empty because it has slowly and through attrition driven out the tenants. It has sat on those empty properties, of which there are now 13, for more than two years. Other tenants, all of whom paid their rent and who have lived there for years are all being driven out, facing homelessness and so on. What is the fund doing? It is driving up the value of the asset. Then when it shifts the asset without the tenants - the only way it could finally shift the tenants and mass-evict them was by saying it was on grounds of sale - the value of that complex will have increased. The new owner will now be able to charge rents far in excess of the rent pressure zone, RPZ, increases. There will be no tax paid on the capital gain made on that flipping of a property and tax paid on the rental revenue derived from the fund being able to charge absolutely extortionate rent which has, by the way, resulted in people knocking on the door of Dún Laoghaire Rathdown County Council and saying they are homeless. These are good, decent, ordinary working people. That is what this is facilitating.

The Minister said there is no alternative to that. I can think of one example. The credit unions have been screaming at the Government for the last six or seven years saying they have €5 billion they would like to use to assist the State in delivering social and affordable housing. Credit unions are not-for-profit financial institutions, beloved of the people, which are not about making money but have instead social objectives. They are saying they would like to assist the State in the delivery of social and affordable housing. They are being completely frustrated in their efforts to do that. The Government would rather team up with vulture funds because apparently we need them.

I have one last point. I asked the Minister about it yesterday. We do not even know how much tax is being forgone. The Minister said they pay this much tax. That is a meaningless figure to trot out if we do not know how much tax is forgone. How much money would they have paid in tax if they were subject to CGT and tax on their rental roll? Until we know the answer to that, we cannot in any way assess the supposed benefit the Minister is imputing to these funds. He will not convince me under any circumstances but at the very least, surely the finance and budget scrutiny committees of these Houses are entitled to know. We do this with other tax expenditures. Certainly this is something the Committee on Budgetary Oversight, of which I am a member, has been pursuing very vigorously.

We believe a light needs to be shone on tax expenditures. They need to be discussed. This is a real cost to the Exchequer in the same way as direct public expenditure is a cost, and yet we do not know how much money is being lost from the extension of these tax breaks to these ruthless profit-hungry vulture funds.