Michael McGrath (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The Minister will not hear any bombast form me. I will make a few points and I want us to get down to the detail of the Bill. I remind the Minister as other Deputies have done that he does not have any mandate to introduce this property tax Bill because he said he would not do it. In the general election campaign he and his party campaigned on the basis that it would not introduce any annual recurring tax on the family home. His party claimed it would be unfair and it was considering alternatives such as increasing user charges for waste. The central idea it had was a local site sale profits tax. It claimed that both of those would be fairer and more economically sensible than an annual recurring property tax. That is the basis on which Fine Gael contested the election and got the votes. The Labour Party advocated a site-value tax but suggested that people in negative equity should be taken into account as should people who paid stamp duty. It also argued that certain categories would need to be exempt. So there is no mandate for the introduction of this property tax by the Government.

At the heart of it, the flaw is that the Government is not taking into account in any way the ability to pay. It is not taking into account the respective value of the mortgage attached to the property. The Minister concluded his Second Stage speech by saying: "This tax is also structured to adhere to the Government's other key objective to be fair and progressive - the wealthiest will pay the most". That is absolutely untrue. This is not a tax on wealth because if it was the Government would allow people to net off against the value of the property the respective value of the mortgage. That would be a start in this debate. Let us not dress up this Bill as something it is not - it is not a tax on wealth and it takes no account of ability to pay. As I said to the Taoiseach in this House earlier, a family with two, four or six children with a gross weekly income of anything more than €480 per week will not be able to defer this tax in full, which is ridiculous. The Government is giving people in mortgage arrears the choice of paying a property tax or trying to service their mortgage in some way. This is in no way a fair tax.

I lament the way in which we are dealing with this Bill. I hope we can get down to some business but if the Minister had any sense, he would put it back to the new year. When the Taoiseach was challenged in the House today about why there was such a rush to bulldoze it through the House, he replied that we were taking up the Presidency of the EU on 1 January and we need to get these things out of the way. I can tell the Minister that this Bill and the property tax are far more important to most ordinary Irish people than Ireland taking up the Presidency of the EU. There is no logical reason we cannot return to this in January and debate it in a mature and responsible way.

See this speech in context