Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

There are many problems facing the Irish people. Finding a house to live in and to rent is certainly one of them. Solving the housing and homelessness crisis will be one of the big challenges facing the Taoiseach-to-be. Many things need to be done. The new Taoiseach will need to challenge the fact that this is one of the few countries in the developed world that does not tax landbanking. A major difficulty is that private developers have an incentive not to build because the latter is more profitable for them. We have never tackled this problem. We need to remove the extraordinary tax incentives afforded to the new institutional landlords in Ireland in the form of real estate investment trusts, REITs - such as Hibernia REIT and Irish Residential Property, I-RES REIT - which pay bugger all tax on their rental incomes and no capital gains on their future sales. This should be compared with the traditional landlord who must pay tax on both.

We must stop selling Ireland to the vulture funds. The new Taoiseach should make it illegal for Irish banks to sell the underperforming mortgage or small business loan of any person to a vulture fund. He needs to commence a programme of building social and affordable housing directly by the State because that has not started. We cannot rely on the private sector to develop social housing through Part V. It will never deliver enough. The National Asset Management Agency, NAMA, says it can provide 20,000 units at approximately €350,000 each. Those units could be done for €250,000 each but the new Taoiseach must put the structure in place, take NAMA's land and pay builders to build on it. He should not pay developers to build on NAMA land. If he pays builders, the units can be supplied for €100,000 less per unit. We need affordable as well as social housing.

I ask the new Taoiseach to immediately suspend the activities of NAMA that have played a role in all the issues I have raised and that have created the housing crisis. NAMA has facilitated landbanking by selling huge swathes of land at fire-sale prices to developers and has facilitated REITs through its policy of selling huge apartment blocks in bulk at fire-sale prices and facilitated vulture funds such as Cerberus by selling the loans and mortgages of Irish people at knockdown prices. One of the final decisions of the outgoing Taoiseach was to set up the commission of investigation into NAMA's Project Eagle. The Comptroller and Auditor General considered one dimension of one portfolio and found it wanting. That is only the tip of the iceberg. There are many more problems coming down the track. The Comptroller and Auditor General may soon be investigating Project Tolka and this morning we were told about problems relating to Project Nantes. In March 2014, one month before NAMA came under the remit of the freedom of information legislation, the board of the agency agreed to delete the emails of all former staff after one year. Its parent agency, the National Treasury Management Agency, NTMA, has no such policy. NAMA tells us this is best commercial practice. It seems to forget that it is a State agency. Time will show that the workings of NAMA will prove to be the biggest financial scandal in the history of this State and I hope the new Taoiseach will spare no energy in getting to the truth. It does Ireland no favours to be seen as a cowboy country when it comes to doing big business.

The Taoiseach-to-be says he is a decisive character. He should get rid of the Garda Commissioner. It is outrageous that she is still in place. That will be the first step required to change how we do policing in Ireland. We will not change the position until the new Taoiseach takes action on that matter and the sooner he does so, the better.

I welcome the parents of the future Taoiseach to the Chamber. We will be merciless in our efforts to hold him to account but we respect him and will treat him with respect. Our criticism will never be personal. We will not be voting for him. We do not agree with his politics but we wish him well because, despite the fact that our policies and our way of looking at how society should be organised are very different, it is in everybody's interests to do so.

The better he does for the people of Ireland, the better all around. I wish Deputy Varadkar the best and good luck to the last fellow.

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