Mark Ward (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I listened to the Minister on the radio this morning talking about the forecasted budgetary surplus. He had a caveat that forecasts can be unreliable and that we need to be cautious, and rightly so. Census figures are not forecasts, however; they are factually correct. The figures from the census in 2022 show that there were 160,000 vacant properties. Some 48,000 of these were vacant in 2016 and a further 23,500 were vacant in 2011. Those are the facts.

The Government's vacant property tax of 0.3% of the property value is exactly as it was described already. It is derisory and it is window dressing and it is a way for the Government to look like it is trying to tackle this issue when it is plainly not doing that. I do not know how many people come to me with a list of houses. They say that X, Y and Z houses have been boarded up for the last six months and they ask why they cannot have them when they have been on the council list for eight or nine years. It is heartbreaking when people come to me on that issue and I have lost count of how many times it has happened. There are five houses in my area that have been left idle for eight or nine months and they are council houses on public property. That is all because of the lack of tradesmen who are working directly for the council. Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have privatised local authorities which have relet properties. They are bringing in contractors from outside and some of the work these contractors are doing is shoddy. I have had people moving in after relets after ten or 12 years waiting on a council list and they have had issues with damp, mould and so on because of this shoddy workmanship. We have to get back to directly employing tradesmen with our local authorities.

We also need to give the local authorities the ability to go out and purchase other vacant properties that are in our area. There is a property in Palmerston that I got an answer back on yesterday that the local authority is going to look at. It has been vacant for ten years at this stage and the owner will come in and maybe use it for a small bit of time and then it is vacant again. For ten years it has basically been vacant and people are going by and watching this all the time.

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