Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Minister mentioned that the transactions relate to a small portion of the market. That is what is in the speaking notes the Government has been given but the reality is that the portion is not small. In fairness, the Minister was told this by his officials through the tax strategy paper. It states the measure has not been entirely successful in its goal and that hundreds of homes, new and existing, are being bought by vulture funds in the market. The Government promised this would not happen. The Minister seems to be justifying this by saying the houses do not disappear. They do not disappear but we know what is happening. The funds are charging rents of €3,175 down the road in Dublin 17. The Minister either believes it is wrong or believes it is right.

The Minister has started to talk about apartments. We are very conscious of what is happening with houses. Deputy McDonald put it on the record. In 2022, the year after the Government introduced these measures, the funds bought up 2,053 houses across the State.

They were houses, not apartments. Let us not introduce the idea of forward funding, forward purchasing or forward financing. Let us talk about the fact that 2,053 houses were bought by institutional funds in 2022. Does the Minister know what percentage of the overall new-build housing in the State that represents? It is significant. There were 20,000 new builds in 2022. The number of new dwellings purchased that year, which includes apartments and houses, was 2,353. Those are census figures.

Did the penny drop last week when this issue started to be raised? The tax strategy papers told the Minister this was not working. The Minister can get the figures I got last week at any time. The Government has tried to throw this over to us. We told it in 2021 that this was not working. In our alternative budget we have an increase in stamp duty as part of our proposal. The CSO published the data last year. In 2021, the Department did a report on the fact that institutional investors accounted for 10% of all purchases and sales in the market in 2021. The problem here is that the CSO data, which does not include approved housing bodies, shows that institutional funds bought more homes than ever before in 2022. They bought more houses, apartments, existing dwellings and new homes than ever before in 2022.

There has been fake outreach from the Government where it says we need to look into this and we are going to review it. As the Minister for Finance, I suggest to the Minister, given what he has said, that he does not have a notion of doing anything about this issue outside the budgetary cycle. Why would he? He was told about this last year and did nothing.