Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Minister's officials, experts and professors on the outside are telling him this is not going to work but he is going ahead with it because that is what his party does in terms of the interests of landlords. There is a perverse incentive in our tax code, which I addressed at the finance committee, that Fine Gael introduced many years ago and that encourages landlords to sell. All the different agencies and advisers are telling landlords to sell now and that now is the time to sell if they want to be tax efficient. That is because there is a CGT exemption for the thousands of homes that were bought between 2011 and 2014. If landlords bought a home in 2014 and held onto it until 2021, they would pay no CGT on the €200,000 average uplift on the property. If they sold it last year, they would have to pay €8,500. If they sell it this year, they will have to pay €15,000. If they sell it next year, it will be €23,000. The tax goes up every year. There is an incentive for landlords to sell. What the Minister has introduced with this €600 tax relief and the €1,000 it will increase to, which equates to hundreds of millions of euro in taxpayers' money going into landlords' pockets, is not going to work. His officials have told him that and expert, formerly of the ESRI, has told him that. Why does he continue to go ahead with this when the real issue here is Fine Gael's incentive for landlords to sell up, which is having an effect on hundreds of people? Hundreds of landlords have sold up as they benefit from this tax exemption.

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