Dr. Shane Whelan:

There has been some crossover between site value tax and the zoned residential land tax, but there are parallels between them. The wealth tax is being proposed to replace the commercial rate in tax which has been broken. The zoned residential land tax is coming in to replace the vacant site levy which was poorly enforced. I completely echo the comments made by Deputy Michael Healy-Rae on the need for farmland to be completely exempt from it and for a thorough review of taxes as currently proposed to exclude farmland. As it has been noted, farmland was exempt from the vacant site levy, so the precedent is there.

I will address the four unjust areas within the design of the existing residential land tax for the benefit of the committee and to maybe bring this forward in getting the levy removed. In the first instance, as has been noted, farmers are private landowners and are not builders. They own land to farm it, and not to hoard it as an investment. That is evidenced by the strong intergenerational transfer between farms, as well as the limited number of sales on the market. The other area is that there is a complete lack of transparency in relation to the tax-----