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

This is my view now, rather than the report’s view. The difficulty is that in recent times – this is the second time in the past 20 years – we have seen property values and house prices, whichever way one wants to look at it, shoot up to astronomical levels. We saw it pre-2008 and we are just about to see us reach the same levels of property prices that we had before the crash in 2008. The difficulty that many people feel here about taxes on their family home is that they have no control whatsoever over that rise in prices. Do the witnesses know what I mean? It bears absolutely no relationship to their income. In fact, I think most people looking at the Irish housing market at the moment would say it is completely dysfunctional. One aspect of that dysfunctionality is the value of people’s homes have just gone through the roof - in particular areas as well. There are huge anomalies there. If a person happens to live in a certain part of an urban centre, a very modest home could be massively over-valued in real terms. That person then gets hit for a tax based on that value. I do not know whether our witnesses have any comment on that and whether that is an issue that arises elsewhere with property taxes. I am just curious as to whether it exists anywhere else. Certainly, I would favour distinguishing between a property that is somebody’s home and property that is wealth beyond their own principal private residence - in other words, where people have multiple properties.

There is quite an important distinction between those two things, namely, a place that is just a home and a place that is an asset but is not necessarily a home or is even an asset from which revenue is generated by renting it out, speculating on it or whatever. Are there any comments on those points?