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

My comments are on a similar note. The points were made in the earlier discussion as well. We have a similar amendment. What has happened in recent years in this country is really extraordinary. The approach that Fine Gael and its partners, the Labour Party and the Independent Alliance, have taken to the property sector is quite extraordinary given what had happened previously. We could talk about amnesia.

How could anyone think it was a good idea to incentivise property speculators after a bubble and crash that was caused by property speculators? How could anyone think of bringing even bigger proper speculators in to replace the mostly-domestic property speculators that helped to produce the crash of 2008? It beggars belief. Those responsible must be literally off their rockers. However, that was a concerted policy for real estate investment trusts and vulture funds. The then Minister for Finance, Deputy Michael Noonan, or Department officials had 64 meetings with these people in the period when many of the tax changes to benefit these entities were brought in. It was a conscious decision to bring these players in in the belief that it would restore the property sector. The last thing we needed to do was to restore the property sector to enable it to do all of the things that led us to the last property bubble and crash. However, that is what we have done with these tax breaks.

As a consequence, rents and property prices are now spiralling out of control. Moreover, there has been a massive hand-over of property assets which, for a brief moment, we had in our hands. That is the awful thing. For a brief moment, via NAMA, we actually had these assets where we needed to have them, that is, in the hands of the State. We could have taken that opportunity and utilised those property assets and the revenues that were derived from them to provide housing and help small and medium-sized enterprises with office space. Had we done that, we would have done society a major favour and we would have prevented the possibility of crazy booms and slumps of the type that have wrecked the country in the past and that are likely to wreck the country again. Instead, we handed over the assets to an even smaller bunch or clique of enormous funds and international property speculators, mostly from the USA.

I wish to highlight an additional point that has not been made. We do not even know how much tax is forgone in all of this. That is the other extraordinary fact. In the case of most tax loopholes, allowances and reliefs, we know how much tax is foregone. That allows us to assess whether any benefit arose, and we can carry out a cost benefit analysis. In this case, for the cost analysis one need only look at the property sector, with the unaffordability of property and rents and the vast profits that keep rising for these entities. However, we cannot even assess the revenue side because we simply do not know. We cannot get figures. The Government cannot even tell us how much tax was forgone.

Really, the Mafia could have designed a scheme of the sort that we have seen with NAMA, with the combination and interlocking of the hand-over of NAMA assets with the myriad or array of tax breaks. PricewaterhouseCoopers was the firm that advised these speculators to come into the Irish property market. It referred to the array of tax breaks that will allow certain organisations to walk away paying no tax whatsoever. We do not even know how much that tax foregone is. The figure is in the hundreds of millions of euro, without question. More likely, it is in the billions of euro. The Government cannot even tell us.

The least we could do is produce a report on all of this to establish the consequences for the property market, including the residential market, in terms of the taxes forgone. People need a proper explanation and understanding of what the Government has done and what the consequences have been for all of us. That should include the consequences for the economy in a macro sense and for people who must now pay a fortune or who simply cannot access the prices and rents that these entities are seeking for the properties.

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