Dr. Se?n Healy:

Just to take that particular point one step further because I would support the windfall tax idea, the political reason given in 2014 for taking it off the books had no political merit whatsoever, for the simple reason that it was quite obvious that in the years immediately after the crash, there was going to be no great windfall anywhere in Ireland for God’s sake. There was nothing. The first year that there was likely to be an income of any substance from it was the year it was pulled. The political justification for it was zero; it did not stand up at all.

To address the Deputy’s question on nationalisation, this comes from being around perhaps longer than himself. The Oireachtas had a committee or a commission – I cannot remember which – at one point on the Constitution. It was co-chaired by the late Deputy Brian Lenihan and former Deputy Jim O’Keeffe. In a submission and in a presentation to that commission, we made a proposal that no land could be rezoned unless it was owned by the State or the local authority. In other words, they had to buy the land first before it was rezoned and we would use the kinds of things that were recommended previously in a report, I cannot remember-----