Michael Noonan (Limerick City, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

We always intended, as a kind of incentive to the property market, that those who bought houses in 2013 would be exempt from property tax, but there was an error in the drafting of the Bill which was brought to my attention last spring. Rather than announce something that might adversely affect the property market, particularly in Dublin, which was just about to take off at the time, we said we would leave it go and correct it at the end of the year. The cost of it was somewhere just in excess of €3 million. If this error had not occurred in the draft, the Revenue would have collected slightly in excess of €3 million extra in the course of 2013.

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