Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I am telling the House what the European Commission is saying. According to the report I have mentioned, "the current levels of capital expenditure in Ireland are barely sufficient to replace the existing stock of public capital". It also points out that "net public investment ... was negative or close to zero in 2012 to 2014". I agree with other Deputies who have said during this debate that the State needs to start spending on public housing. I believe we should heed the advice of the National Economic and Social Council by using the cost-rental model it is suggesting. Other countries, including Austria, are able to use future income streams from market rents accrued by the state or the housing association to raise funding outside the rules of the fiscal compact. That is what other countries do. I do not believe there is any reason we should not do it. It is going to require the State to start spending and to heed what has been said by the European Commission, the Nevin Economic Research Institute, IBEC and the IMF. They have said that the State has not invested enough money in its infrastructure over the last five years. That needs to change in the next Government and we should start by putting housing in the right place. We should build clean housing so that we save people money over the lifetime of the building. That is not impossible to do. We need to take NAMA and put it into a national housing authority. A site value taxation system that makes sense had been set up for this Government when it took office five years ago. It was ready to go. It provides an incentive for us to build, an environmental gain and some of the funding that the Minister says he needs to build infrastructure. I wish the Government had done what it said it would do in the programme for Government. If it had availed of the site value tax system that had been set up for it, rather than initiating a dumb property tax that is there just to raise revenue for the Department of Finance, we would not be in the same crisis we are in today. We should start by learning from that mistake and providing for a proper site value tax. The proceeds of that tax should be used to pay for the infrastructure that we badly need to build in this State.

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