Mr. Brian Moran:

That is why I am saying if it was introduced gradually, land prices would drop. The developer would not be paying the inflated price and the money would then be freed up to go into infrastructure rather than being paid to the original landowner. Making it retrospective, and applying it to people who bought land in good faith in recent years would create a major problem. It would cause financial distress, particularly for smaller builder-developers and family-owned firms whose balance sheets could be completely thrashed by something like that happening. Overnight, the valuation of land they thought they had as bank collateral would drop very rapidly. That could cause serious distress, much more so in the smaller builder-developer sector than among the large institutionally-funded developers who can take a hit like that, albeit it would destroy confidence in Ireland as an investment location for foreign investors.