Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Minister can huff and puff all he wants. A Belcamp Manor is happening every month under his watch. He knows it. The figures stand over exactly what I said. There were 623 homes bought by vulture funds and investment funds last year alone.

That is the equivalent of a Belcamp Manor every single month. The majority of those purchases are in the region of Dublin. In the first nine months of last year 70% of completions were apartments. The Minister exempted apartments from all of his planning regulations and stamp duties. Vulture funds are free to go in and buy as many apartments as they wish under this Government. The number of houses completed in the first nine months in Dublin was just over 2,600 homes, some of which were social homes so would never be on the market for ordinary buyers in the first place. Vulture funds bought 623 homes and the Minister tries to pretend that this is a small impact of less than 1%. It is nothing like it. It is having a significant impact in the Dublin market. The Minister told us that he would not stand over it yet he knows about this. Belcamp Manor is no surprise. The Minister for Finance was told in the tax strategy papers last summer that this was happening in the scale of hundreds. That Minister was told that the tax measure was not working. The solution is, as Sinn Féin argued back in 2022, to increase stamp duty on vulture funds to a point where they will not do this. Sinn Féin has a motion before the Dáil and the Government is voting against it. The Minister is feigning outreach and feigning that he will do something. The Government is voting against a solution that will stop vulture funds buying these properties from first-time buyers.

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