Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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People Before Profit, among others, has always opposed the property tax. Given the review that is under way and the fact that, at some point, the Minister will have to make decisions on all these matters, will he consider abolishing the LPT at this time? When it was introduced, the Government said it would provide more funding for local services. It has not done so. We were told it would help to dampen the type of property madness we saw prior to 2008. It clearly has not achieved that objective. In addition, it has proved in its operation not to be fair in the way the Government suggested it would be. Increases in the tax have been deferred several times and the Minister does not know quite what to do in that regard. We are left with a situation where the Government is having to look at all sorts of convolutions to reconfigure it. Is not all of this proof that the tax was fundamentally flawed from the beginning and was always going to be unfair?

The basic problem is that the payment was linked to property prices, something over which householders have absolutely no control, and which have, in the intervening period, gone out of control. It represents an additional payment for something people have paid for already and, moreover, ability to pay - that is, the income coming into the household - is not taken into account at all. All these chickens have come home to roost and the Minister is left in the dilemma of what to do. Without being too political about it, it is surely fair for those of us who opposed the tax from the beginning to say that this dilemma is good reason to reconsider its whole merit. Our view is that it is a fundamentally flawed tax. The Minister must finally deal with the problems arising out of the linkage between the tax and property values, which are going through the roof. If we go ahead with the tax as originally envisaged, those increased property prices will see huge increases in payments due. Even after any changes the Minister might introduce, the problem of the linkage with property values remains at the heart of the issue. Will the Minister now consider that the problem is, in fact, the property market? Will he take on board the other matters we have been highlighting all along?

Rather than put an unfair tax on the family home, will he review things like wealth taxes, particularly in the context of the enormous wealth generated by those who are speculating on property? A reconfigured property tax might be redirected away from ordinary homeowners towards those who are profiteering from the property sector, driving it out of control and doing immense damage at several levels to society, including to the people who are trying to put an affordable roof over their head. At this point, the mess in the property market amounts to a macroeconomic threat.