Professor Michael McMahon:

I will make two points. As the Deputy knows, we do not comment specifically on one particular tax measure or another, but the evidence on wealth taxes from Ireland and many other countries indicates that the devil is in the detail of their design. In a world where it is chosen to exclude primary residences and farmland, the calculus gets much harder. If you want to reduce the value of household wealth – I am not saying it is an objective of mine and I am speaking as an economist – one way of doing so is to build many more houses. If you remove the scarcity of housing, the value of houses will decline. I am not suggesting that as a policy but that there are many ways to do this.