Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)

This was an imperfect attempt to deal with the issue given that we did not have access to the costings. I suggest that the Minister could consider a couple of options. One would be a transition arrangement involving a declining scale over a number of months so that costs could be cut dramatically. Alternatively, the Government could simply agree to give people who are in this category one more year of mortgage cover. They are finding they are being cut off at six years if they raised the mortgage in 2003 because of the nature of the tax year. While the Minister is perhaps correct that the average price of a house in 2004 was €24,000 more than the price in 2003, the price of a house purchased on 1 January 2004 was probably no different from one purchased on 31 December 2003. The argument could be reversed to ask why we treat people who are only a day apart in their house purchases so differently. Either we could choose a transitional arrangement, which is common among the provisions introduced by the Department of Finance, or we could give an additional year to this category of people, which would be fairly simple and cheap.

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