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

As I stated, we are in an invidious position in which we cannot really oppose this. If it stops even one eviction, it is better than allowing the eviction to take place. In a finance Bill, we would hope the Government would look for the best, most efficient and most sensible expenditure of public money. It is a pity that in order to deal with a problem that the Government failed to address for four years, the only way to stop further evictions is to line the pockets of developers and landlords. We are back to where we started because of the emergency.

Will there be an investment programme in social housing from public capital expenditure accompanying this amendment in order to do away with the need for this approach to delivering social housing? If not, this will be a recipe to repeat the mistakes of the past. Perhaps the process could be time-bound, phased out and replaced with the provision of council housing that should have been built, as the process should not have been stopped for the past four years. In reply to Deputy Durkan, I say that although we did not have cash, we had NAMA, which had the biggest property portfolio in the history of the State. Effectively, we gave this away.

Will real estate investment trusts, REITs, and big property speculators who borrowed money to buy stock from NAMA, such as big residential properties, benefit from this? Will they be able to write off the interest payments on big purchases involving tens of millions of euro and large numbers of properties? That would be scandal that I would really worry about.

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