Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Prior to the adjournment of this debate I was asking the Minister to answer at some point this evening the question that his Government has failed to answer despite this issue being debated across the country and to some extent, although severely curtailed, in this House. How are people in mortgage distress who are unable to pay their mortgages supposed to pay this charge? They simply cannot do it. The Minister has not answered that question.

We hear the Government talk about its desire to see people stay in their family homes but if it forces people to pay this tax when they cannot pay their distressed mortgages, more people will be forced into arrears and default. With the IMF breathing down the Minister's neck demanding that banks have the right to repossess homes, this is a recipe for more people to lose their family homes. How is any one of the 430,000 people who have no job, who are surviving on €188 per week, or someone surviving on the State pension, which is worth approximately the same amount, or even someone who has an additional modest occupational pension, supposed to pay this tax? It is a sure-fire recipe to drive people who are already living on the bread line into poverty, an unsustainable situation.

It is coming up to Easter, the time of miracles, if the Minister believes in all that kind of thing, but unless he is proposing the economic equivalent of the miracle of the loaves and the fishes for the whole country, how are people supposed to manage this? They simply cannot. The idea that deferral of payments is somehow an acceptable concession on the Minister's part to deal with this problem is preposterous because what he is offering people is years and years of being in the appalling situation of trying to pay back mortgages they cannot manage, and maybe if they can get out of this situation, they will be faced with a massive debt. Is that really what the Minister is offering to people?

I would like a response to the other important point I raised today, if possible. Our more general point has been that the alternative to this is a real wealth tax, levied on those with real wealth, the multi-millionaires, the billionaires, the people with very high earnings, in excess of €100,000, the many tens of thousands of people on high incomes, or an increase in tax on the super-profitable corporations which the Minister seems to view as sacrosanct. Whatever other sector of our society has to be battered with cuts, taxes and charges, the Minister refuses even to discuss the possibility of imposing an extra bit of tax on this super-profitable corporate sector. He has never really answered that question except to offer meaningless drivel about not taxing jobs, which I fail to understand when his taxes have helped sustain a level of mass chronic unemployment.

As if to add insult to injury, this is not even an equitable tax, within its own terms, on homes, which the Minister says it is, or on what he calls a property asset. In the definitions of liable residential property in the Bill that was rammed through under a guillotine before Christmas, the value of gardens and areas adjacent to the house will be calculated in working out the amount of property tax people have to pay, but if the area is over one acre the gardens or estates that may surround the homes of wealthy people with big houses or mansions will not be calculated. The mansions and the super-wealthy are protected. How can the Minister justify that? The value of a small bit of a garden or a back yard will be taken into account when calculating the tax the Minister intends to impose but the large gardens and sprawling estates that many wealthy people have with their large houses will not be liable.

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