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

Thousands of individuals and families throughout Ireland are this week receiving letters from Revenue detailing estimates of their local property tax liabilities. Many families are struggling on low incomes and cannot pay their mortgages, yet they are none the less expected to pay the property tax. The Government has decided that families with a gross weekly income of anything above €480 are not allowed to defer their liabilities. Anyone who genuinely cannot afford to pay will be hit with a penalty interest of 8% per annum.

This tax is deeply unfair and fails in any meaningful way to take an inability to pay into account. Today, we learned that seven out of the eight people living in unfinished housing estates who were exempt from last year's household charge would be required to pay this property tax. The number of people in unfinished developments who are exempted has dropped spectacularly from 43,000 to 5,000 simply because the Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government instructed local authorities to visit every unfinished development and identify which houses should pay.

What people want above all else is fairness and consistency. A family that lives in an unfinished housing estate and is lucky enough to have a footpath outside the door and a working public light must pay the property tax, yet another family around the corner in the same estate will be exempted because its house looks out onto a heap of rubble that should have been a green area. This is a ridiculous scenario.

The Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government is using the National Housing Development Survey 2012 report to justify the dramatic drop in the number of people who will be allowed to avail of an exemption. According to it, there are approximately 1,100 unfinished developments that are in a "seriously problematic condition". The report outlines what must be wrong in an estate for it to fall into this category. The estate would need to be in a bad condition to qualify.

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