Joe Flaherty (Fianna Fail)

I welcome all the speakers, especially the representatives of the IPOA and IPAV. I wish Genevieve McGuirk the very best in her new role that she takes up on 1 August. We will obviously miss Mr. Davitt being here as he has been a great voice for the market and for auctioneers. I am especially pleased to see landlords represented here. Too often, we do not hear the voice of landlords. It is a very important voice. Everybody here appreciates that we have a housing crisis and there are many victims of the housing crisis, namely, people who cannot get accommodation, but an unheard of victim in all this, though, have been the mom-and-pop landlords, the small-scale landlords, who - despite our best efforts - we have driven out of the market as a Government and as legislators. We must stand up and take ownership of it.

I agree with Mr. Davitt that the system is broken and all we are doing is tinkering with it. If we cast our minds back, and Fintan McGill from County Longford will be familiar with this, when the crash came in 2008, we had 2,500 vacant properties in County Longford. All of them were investor properties, mom-and-pop investor properties bought for a pension fund. If we did not have those 2,500 houses, we would be in a diabolical situation. This is replicated right across the country.

We do not like international investors. We know that. Our Opposition parties do not like that. We need to make it attractive for the small investor - the small landlord - to come back into the market. We are not doing that. Nobody in the Government has ever grabbed the big issue of the day. We need to make it financially incentivised for landlords to come back into the market. We had section 23 and we had the rural renewal scheme. They were much criticised in the aftermath of the crash, but at the same time these were the schemes that gave us 2,500 houses in County Longford. We desperately need them now because no other houses were built. Is it time for the Government to look at an incentive scheme to encourage small-scale landlords to come back into the market, whether we incentivise them through taxation or through being able to get a pension top-up later? I am posing this question to the IPOA and the IPAV. I would like to get both perspectives.