Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Last night, the Government pulled a political stroke by forcing through a last-minute amendment that gave a tax break to vulture funds to buy up thousands of homes throughout the State, pushing up house prices and outbidding first-time buyers. We really could not make this up. In the middle of a housing crisis, when the Minister knows and every person in the House knows that young people are locked out of affordable housing, that people cannot pay the cost of them and that there is a scarcity of housing, the Government unleashed these vulture funds to wreak havoc in the housing market by buying up these homes from under the noses of aspiring home owners. It has now given them a tax break to do so. Let there be no doubt that while the Government won the amendment last night, and the vulture funds and cuckoo funds won the amendment last night, it was the ordinary people of this city and the State who lost out. It was aspiring home owners who lost out, it was first time buyers who lost out, it was renters who lost out and it was the taxpayers who lost out. Will the Minister explain why the Green Party adopted this shameful position?

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