Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

That is not right. I will give an example. If a handful of us set up a company and we purchased a number of rental properties and we have a rental income of €10 million per annum, then the company will have to pay corporation tax on the income. If we dispose of some of those properties, we will have to pay capital gains tax at the upper limit. If the company then wants to give us dividends from the profit it is making, we will pay a dividend withholding tax of 25% and because we are resident in Ireland we will pay tax at the marginal rate. That is the tax structure in terms of an Irish company. If we do the same thing through an IREF, we pay no corporation tax on the rental income, no capital gains tax when we sell any of the assets and we do not have to make disbursements to the shareholders. REITs do, up to 85%, but IREFs do not. An IREF would continue to recycle the money, building up the asset base until eventually we would sell it off. That is what can happen here. There is no capital gains tax when we sell the whole lot off. These structures are wrong.

I appreciate everybody's views. Deputy Higgins thinks the Minister is doing a splendid job and Fine Gael in government for the past ten years has done great on housing. It is fantastic. The fact that most of the Minister's constituents are priced out of the market probably does not bother him. The fact is younger people cannot even think of owning a home. The fact that people in his constituency are charged close to €2,000 obviously does not bother him because all he wants to do is attack Sinn Féin. We think a completely different policy needs to be followed. Whatever the rights and wrongs of it – I think it was wrong – the experiment of allowing the institutional investors to go tax free has failed. That means they have an advantage that not only can push up prices for people in this city but can also set a new floor for the rest of the State.

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