Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

An old chestnut that I raise every time the Department appears before the committee is the local property tax. In his opening statement, Mr. Doyle said a further €91.5 million was made available from local property tax receipts to fund housing programmes in certain local authorities.

We know there is a self-funding aspect for roads and housing as part of this scheme.

The difficulty is with the baselines. For example, there is increased buoyancy in the local property tax fund by virtue of the fact that properties built from 2013 had not been within the system but have been brought into it now. There has been no commensurate increase in the baseline, however. A local authority like Fingal County Council, for example, doubled its population between 1996 and 2016, the year of the most recent census, but population does not feature anywhere in the allocation provided. The Comptroller and Auditor General was very kind in his opening statement when he said it was a "complex" system of funding local authorities. It is Byzantine rather than complex in my opinion. What will be done about the baselines?