Mairead Farrell (Galway West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Cuirim fáilte roimh an díospóireacht ar an mBille Airgeadais ach admhaím go bhfuil imní orm faoi chúpla rud sa Bhille seo. Ar ndóigh, táimid á phlé seo le linn ama eisceachtúil agus le linn paindéime, ach mar sin féin, caithfimid déileáil leis na rudaí atá go fíor míchothrom sa Stát seo.

There was one thing in this year’s Finance Bill that I admit has caught me by surprise, which is the subsidies for NATO military forces for the exemptions they will receive from 2022 from VAT excise for services and goods. It will be interesting to hear what that actually entails. When I read "NATO", at first I wondered if I had read it correctly, as in whether this is the same organisation that was set up to check the Soviet Union, which does not exist anymore? Why would it now need exemptions come 2022? Nevertheless, there seems to be a will that the taxpayers of Ireland, a neutral country, would provide tax subsidies to foreign military forces from an organisation that our country is not even a member of. I would love to know the benefit of giving such a tax subsidy to a military force. I am very interested to see what kind of cost-benefit analysis was done for the State on this.

We are aware that there are already massive costs to the State from the exemption of fees for US military flights. According to Shannonwatch, between 2003 and 2019 the cost incurred by the Irish Aviation Authority in exempting fees for en route services for military and other flights was €46 million, the lion's share of which is accounted for by US military flights. Furthermore, in 2016 it was reported that the cost of having the Garda and the Army protect US military planes at Shannon Airport was almost €1.5 million a year.

Earlier this year my colleague, Deputy O’Rourke, wrote to the Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, who confirmed that US and other military aircraft traversing Irish airspace or indeed landing in Ireland do not pay air traffic control charges. I would like an explanation as to why Irish taxpayers are now being asked to further subsidise conflict, war and aggression. Where does the drive for this initiative come from?

Another aspect of the Bill that concerns me, and which I also referred to on budget day, is that the Government, much like its predecessors, seems to have a housing strategy that continues to rest on the private developer-led model. This has led us to into the housing crisis we face today. It has made housing unaffordable for many and has led to sky-high rents and an unprecedented homelessness crisis. The concessionary measures outlined in the Finance Bill are just the further expression of this. Two measures in particular stand out. These are the extension of the disastrous help-to-buy scheme and the loosening of the requirements for developers to avail of the stamp duty refund scheme for residential development. The former scheme, which increases the tax relief for first-time buyers from €20,000 to €30,000, has been inflationary for house prices and it has been poorly targeted. Effectively, it is a subsidy to developers and no doubt this is why the Government has chosen to extend and increase it. It helped to push up property prices, much to the delight of developers I am sure. There were instances where its introduction pushed up house prices in certain locations by almost €10,000 practically overnight. That is not much use to those who are trying to get onto the property ladder for the first time. Figures have shown that more than 40% of the help-to-buy recipients already had the deposit saved, and therefore it did not help in this regard. One would have thought that the Government would have been concerned about this. A person would have been forgiven for thinking the Government would scrap a scheme where almost half of the help-to-buy recipients did not require what the scheme was intended to do, which was to help.

Another gift to developers has been the stamp duty refund scheme for residential development which allows a refund mechanism to reduce the effective stamp duty rate for qualifying developments to 2%. This is on the condition that these developments are completed in a timely manner within two years. What do we see in this Finance Bill? That requirement has now been pushed back to two and a half years. The developers can avail of the effective 2% rate even if they are now 25% slower in terms of the completion rate. The message is very loud and clear. Instead of giving ever more concessions to private developers, it would be better for the State to break from this neoliberal model and develop a large stock of public housing assets. This is what people need. This is what people in homeless services right now need. This is what people trying to get onto the property ladder need. This is what the Government needs to do.

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