Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Seriously, what the Minister is saying just does not make any sense. First of all, this has been going on, as Deputy Nash said, for nearly a decade. A decade ago interest rates were zero at ECB level and many customers were on tracker or fixed rates. Let us therefore be clear about this and have a proper discussion with regard to the facts. Mazars was very clear. The intention of this scheme is not being met. The independent budgetary office says it is pushing up house prices. The war in Ukraine happened, yes, but that is not the reason house prices were going up in the first year of the Minister's being in office or, indeed, the last years of the previous Fine Gael Government, which the Minister supported. House prices have been going up steadily, and it is because of measures such as this. Take somebody who has a 25% deposit. Look at the types of houses being purchased and the values of those houses. Over 30% of houses that are purchased using this scheme have a property value of in excess of €376,000. That is for a start. This was about helping people to get a deposit.

What Government Deputies say all the time when they try to attack Sinn Féin or other Opposition parties is that people would not otherwise have the deposit and so on. Now the Minister has changed the goalposts to people not being able to service their mortgages because interest rates have risen in the past year. This is despite the fact that the scheme has been in place for some time. He has parroted what every Minister for Finance has said on Committee Stage of Finance Bills, namely, "We will keep this under consideration and look at it next year to see if any other changes have to be brought forward". However, the Minister still will not answer my question, namely, what were the metrics he used to decide to extend the help-to-buy scheme against the advice of the independently commissioned report, which said that the scheme had deadweight of 53%? That deadweight has increased since the Department commissioned the report. Why did the Minister ignore Mazars's proposal to increase the loan-to-value ratio from 70% to 80% in order that at least the people availing of this tax benefit would not already have a deposit of 25% to purchase a house?

I acknowledge that purchasing a house is very difficult. Part of the reason for that is the disastrous policies that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have enacted over recent years. I hope the penny will drop at some stage that when the Government keeps repeating the same types of initiatives that do not deal with supply but just put more credit into the market chasing a limited number of properties, maybe, just like others have suggested to the Government independently, those schemes push up house prices. Why does the Government ignore the Mazars recommendation to increase the loan-to-value ratio from 70% to 80%, and what metrics has the Minister used to extend this scheme? What is his long-term thinking, or does he just think in the short term? Did he think, "What will we do with this?", and, "Maybe we should signal that it will come to an end."? The maximum relief available was increased to €30,000 a number of years ago. Perhaps the Minister should have reduced it to €20,000 this year as a step towards ending the scheme. It just makes no sense.