Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

To my mind if we are going to put any kind of stamp duty to try to deter these profit-driven investment funds from bulk buying properties, it should be 100%. Otherwise we are wasting our time. That is what it should be because there is nothing good about these investment funds bulk buying homes. It is disgraceful that apartments are not included. Most of what is being built at the moment is apartments and these funds are buying them up en masse and then charging extortionate rents and passing on the cost. Whatever the constantly inflating cost is, this is passed on into extortionate rents to people who rent those properties, those who can afford them. We need to get these wealth asset management companies, as they like to refer to themselves, who manage the assets of the super-rich and who try to profiteer off the back of our housing crisis, out of the Irish market and out of the Irish housing sector. They serve absolutely no useful purpose whatsoever. It very much highlights the difference in approach between some of us and this Government, which thinks it has to court these investment funds to have a property sector.

Surely we should have realised the folly of that after the last crash and then the stupidity of giving them all the NAMA assets at knockdown prices, and what that has done to create the housing crisis we now face. We need them out of the Irish housing sector, so this is not nearly enough. We need to go a lot further.

See this speech in context