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

We propose to replace the property tax with a landlord tax, which mainly involves wanting to deal with the inequities of the local property tax. In our alternative proposal of a landlord tax, we make a distinction between people who have one additional home and those who own multiple properties and are running a business. A simple distinction could be made in terms of thinking about a vacant home tax.

A dispute in a family over an inheritance may mean that a number of family members are involved in legal issues and so on. Vulture funds, major commercial landowners and so on have multiple properties. Once a person owns more than three or four properties, he or she is involved in a business. It is unconscionable that such people are sitting on empty properties. I cannot think of many complexities in a situation whereby someone who owns multiple properties leaves them empty. This is happening on a major scale.

In the committee, I cited an example of which I have intimate knowledge in my area, namely, the Robin Hill flats in Balally. NAMA sat on them, as it were, and then flogged them to a vulture fund which sat on them and tried to evict tenants because it was profitable for it to let flats lie empty and appreciate in value. That sort of thing is, quite frankly, disgusting. Urgent action could be taken on that, notwithstanding the need to examine the more complex issues relating to families and individuals.

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