Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

-----and what the Minister did at the time of the bank guarantee. Irish households and small businesses are in the grip of a credit famine. Businesses are struggling to get their hands on the money needed to keep paying wages and suppliers. Families looking for a mortgage to set up a home now that houses are more affordable are finding the banks will simply not lend. The banks' reluctance to lend was confirmed in today's survey conducted by the Professional Insurance Brokers Association, just as by the many people who were in contact with me during the past year. NAMA was a €54 billion gamble that was supposed to turn on the tap of free flowing credit. I told the Minister at the time that it would never work. Clearly, the IMF told him at the time that it would not get a flow of credit going again. NAMA will not get credit flowing but Irish taxpayers are still expected to take on a supersized risk. It is time for the Government finally to face up to this reality.

I wish to refer to a related matter. Perhaps the Minister might confirm, during discussions on the Bill, that significant difficulty has arisen with NAMA in respect of the lack of proper title held by developers for properties used as collateral for the loans advanced by the banks. Ironically, stamp duty avoidance by developers, which was common at the height of the boom, resulted in many developers using licensing arrangements. Does the Minister remember all those schools in our constituency where sites were sold at ransom prices by Fianna Fáil developers to the Department of Education and Science? Does he remember all the licensing agreements? We are talking about mega-avoidance of stamp duty.

As a consequence, title was not passed on completely or comprehensively. In 2006, I raised the issue of property developers avoiding the payment of stamp duty by not taking proper title of the property under development and developing it under a licensing arrangement. The loophole was estimated to have cost €251 million in 2006. It was not chickenfeed. The estimated loss to the Exchequer was €36 million resulting from the Irish Glass Bottle site deal alone. Mr. Bernard McNamara and the other co-investors were the chief beneficiaries of that piece of tax avoidance. Time and again, I raised this issue with the Minister's predecessor, now Taoiseach, Deputy Brian Cowen. In 2007, he appeared to relent, inserting section 110 into the Finance Bill of that year. With this section on the Statute Book the loophole should have been closed but the Taoiseach, Deputy Cowen, caved in to pressure from the denizens of the Galway tent. He never signed the commencement order for section 110 which, to this day, remains in abeyance.

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