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

Dr. McDonnell wanted to respond to the questions about nationalisation rather than dealing with all of the complexities. I put it to him that it was a better way to go about it to try to get that land back and to try to prevent speculation, hoarding and people making money off land from doing nothing. I would be curious to hear his answer.

While I have the microphone, I think it was Dr. Collins who was talking about the property tax and essentially defending it, albeit he was saying we could maybe tweak the existing property tax in some way. The way I look at it, we replaced what was a progressive income-related form of taxation with a potentially regressive type of taxation in many cases. When it was centrally funded, it was coming from income taxation, whereas when local authority funding then became based on people's homes, it did not take into account their income. To me, that is the replacement of a progressive form of taxation with a regressive form of taxation. The amount of income that local authorities receive has not changed at all because they removed, euro for euro, all of the block grant funding that local authorities had and replaced it with the local property tax.

Nothing has changed. I would contest the idea that it has brought people closer to the local authorities and made the local authorities more relevant. I do not think that is how people feel on the ground about the local property tax. I put that to Dr. Collins.