Cian O'Callaghan (Dublin Bay North, Social Democrats)
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This is what a spending review published in 2021 by the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, entitled "An Overview of the Irish Housing Market and Policy", had to say about tax expenditures in housing and their effect on the price of development land. This is in the section of the report called "The Land Trap". I will read out just a couple of lines of it.

... competition in the development sector takes place at the land bidding phase ... Developers will calculate the price per unit they can attain in sales as well as their projected development costs and price these into their bids for available development land.... Thus high housing unit prices are locked into the system at the land bidding stage, which is realised by landowners as inflation in the value of their land. This dynamic is highly counterproductive for affordability and viability; it essentially means that any reductions in development costs and higher profits, either through tax breaks or labour/material cost falls, are priced into what developers will bid for land, thereby increasing bidding rates, and dissipating any savings in costs achieved elsewhere.

That is very heavy criticism in this spending review from the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform on the effect of tax breaks and what they do for the price of development land, basically saying that various tax breaks, reliefs and expenditures get baked into the price of development land. The review very strongly makes the case against those. It shows why we urgently need all of these different subsidies, expenditures and reliefs to be urgently reviewed, as shown in our previous discussion about figures from the Central Bank where we had an issue of increasing profits but decreasing investment in productivity levels in the private sector and, at the same time, increased subsidies. There is a very serious issue here that has to be addressed. We have that analysis from the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform. There is a very strong case for removing a lot of these reliefs and instead using that expenditure directly to make housing more affordable. Our goal should be to make housing more affordable in order that more people can access it and to reduce some of the costs rather than measures that are failing to do that.