Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Obviously, we are all waiting for the whistle to be blown in terms of the election. In my time in these Houses, I think this is the 18th Finance Bill I have responded to. Even during the time of the IMF bailout, there was agreement to get the Finance Bill through the House. This guillotine is not appropriate. There are sections in this legislation which will not see the light of day in terms of scrutiny. There were major mistakes that the Minister is closing down in this Bill. For example, his predecessor, Deputy Paschal Donohoe, left a loophole in the Bill in terms of pensions whereby millions of euro were funnelled out of companies into pension funds. I pointed that out to him at the time and he ignored it, as did his predecessor, the Minister, Michael McGrath, when I raised it in a Topical Issue earlier this year, and now this is being closed down in this Bill. I raise that because it is important that we have proper scrutiny of this legislation.

A lot of important pieces of our tax law are being dealt with, including major issues such as pillar 1 and pillar 2 of the OECD BEPS agreement. There are also issues that, as I have mentioned before, the Minister has never even mentioned on the floor of the Dáil. In my time dealing with 18 different Finance Bills, never has there been legislation that granted an income tax reduction of €320,000 to an individual. That is what is contained in this Bill through the Minister's changes to the standard fund threshold, where individuals who already have golden pension pots of €2 million will, as a result of the measures the Minister is introducing, between now and 2028, be able to avail of a pension tax cut of €320,000. Very few people in society will be able to benefit from that. The report the Minister published suggests that only those in the public sector who earn €170,000, which would be Ministers, taoisigh and so on, would benefit from this tax reduction the Government signed off on. It is appalling that it has done that and it is unlikely that the measure will get any serious scrutiny.

There are other issues with this Bill. In section 36, for example, the Government doubles down on the landlords' credit. There is a tax cut of €120 million for landlords at a time when the Minister is being told by Barra Roantree that it is the stupidest tax cut ever "against stiff competition". This is a professor, who has made this point over and over again. Yet this is Fianna Fáil again doing what Fianna Fáil does, and it is very clear in this legislation that there are very clear winners. Yes, there are bits and pieces for others, but those bits and pieces are hundreds of euro here and there. The real winners - let us call a spade a spade - are the people with pension pots of more than €2 million. They win under Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. They win the lotto in this legislation. They get a tax cut of €320,000 as a result of this legislation. The landlords win in this legislation. They shared a tax reduction of €120 million, despite the Minister's officials telling him that this will leave half of landlords in the State paying no tax.

As a previous speaker said, it is also the funds that win. The funds continue to win under Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, and no wonder. Let us just look at the statistics. On a day when the Government released new targets that are abysmally low, let us look at what has happened over the last five years. Why does it happen? It happens because it is contained in the Finance Bills that have been passed over the years. We see that last year 6,203 apartments were bought by funds. That is four times what was being bought by these funds before this Government came into office four years ago. Before Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael came into office on that occasion, there were four times fewer purchases of apartments by funds. It is not just that Noonan rolled out the red carpet; the present Government basically said, "Party on, guys, and you snap up the building going on here." Over half of all apartments in this State in 2023 were bought by funds. Those are the facts. There were 741 apartments bought the year before Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil entered government together. What is the number today? It is 846. It went up by just over a miserable 100 apartment units. Why is that? It is because the funds have increased their grip by nearly 5,000 additional apartments.

That is what is happening, and that is what is contained in the Bill. That is what the Government will vote for when it votes against these amendments, when we say to the Government that it is not fair that those funds, which are charging eye-watering rents in the Minister's city of Dublin, and elsewhere, pay no tax whatsoever in that rental role, that when they dispose of an asset they do not pay capital gains tax on the disposal of that asset and that the effective tax rate is minimal. The Government will say it will increase stamp duty on bulk purchases but it does not apply to apartments because in Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael's little world, apartments are not homes. Funds, however, are not just buying apartments; they are also buying other homes.

The numbers I have put on the record relate to apartments only. Although the funds are continuing to snap up many hundreds of homes every year, the Minister has come forward with the pathetic increase in stamp duty and has said it will stamp it out. It will not. If the Minister really wanted to stamp it out, he would not be saying the increase will bring in revenue. The only way it can bring in revenue is through the funds paying the additional tax. We do not want their tax. We do not want them to be bulk-purchasing homes from under the noses of first-time buyers. That is the problem with guillotining this legislation and, more important, with the legislation in the first instance.

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