Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Minister needs to open his eyes and look at what is happening. Let us look at what the Central Statistics Office, CSO, stated. It stated non-household buyers were outstripping new homeowners in purchases of new houses in Dublin. Who makes up the largest component of non-household buyers? The answer is REITs qualified investor funds. Some 62% of new homes in Dublin were bought by those involved in that component and 44% nationally. They are outbidding families that are trying to get onto the property ladder because of the tax structure. The Minister gave a nice answer, that 85% of income had to be distributed to shareholders, but what he did not tell the House was that 85% of the investment in REITs was foreign. Therefore, there is no capital gains tax to be gained on the uplift of property values. That is why, of the profit of €238 million recorded by the three REITs in their accounts, they paid just over €5 million in tax to the State. The other thing the Minister dodged was the fact that officials in the Department of Finance and Revenue stated there were genuine, valid concerns and that the policy the Minister introduced was clogging up the market because it was more profitable for qualified investment funds or Irish Real Estate Funds, IREFs, to hold on to properties, leave them empty, not sell them or hold on to land because they could avail of the five-year rule, under which there would be no capital gains tax if they held on to property for five years. As the Minister's own officials are telling him this, he needs to step up and change the law to deal with a number of issues. He needs to give commitments in that regard because this is having a detrimental effect on renters and those trying to get into the property market.

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