Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

I support the amendment. The Minister has summed up the complete bind of the Government to a free-market approach to resolving the housing crisis. The Minister accepts that there is a dead weight and a bunch of speculators who will not have to pay tax that they otherwise would have paid but takes the attitude we can do nothing about it if we want to release land onto the markets in order that homes can be built on it. However, if the Government had that money, it could use it to build homes directly. That would be a far more direct way of doing it rather than throwing tax expenditures at a very small number of people at the top of our society and hoping it filters down in the form of increased house building. The change by the Government is an admission. Although we did not hear it from the Minister, it is an admission that this Fine Gael policy contributed to massive land hoarding and the housing crisis. The reason for it was to stop vulture funds flipping properties quickly and, therefore, showing up the fire sale that had been pursued by NAMA and what a good deal they had got at the expense of the public.

I do not think the change from seven years to four years resolves the issue, however. I agree that it can mean for some that they will sell ahead of when they otherwise would have sold. However, if they hang on for seven years, they can still have the benefit of the exemption. They can continue to hang on for seven, eight, nine or ten years and get the benefit of the exemption. If I recall correctly, in the budgetary documents a cost of zero is outlined alongside this measure. That just cannot be accurate. As the Minister stated, at the very least there is some dead weight involved. At the very least there are people who plan to sell buildings or land next year. They were going to swallow the cost of the capital gains tax but now will still sell but will not pay the tax, and the public will lose out as a consequence.

The change since Committee Stage in the Minister's response about whether there is a legal impediment to this differentiation seems to me to be significant. It is fair enough that the formulation of "land" may be imprecise because property is built on land. However, is it not possible to come up with a legal definition of vacant land? That is land that has nothing built on it. That is the only place the argument can be made about whether there is an incentive to get building land onto the market. Is it not possible to come up with such a definition and therefore limit the benefit of this tax expenditure to those parcels of land which may actually provide new housing?

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