Holly Cairns (Cork South West, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I think the Tánaiste can probably understand why people feel such a huge disconnect between the picture he paints and the reality they experience when they try to buy a home. Every year since the Government has been in office, the cost of an average home has gone up by more than €20,000. I asked the Tánaiste about the delivery of affordable purchase homes and he spent three minutes talking about everything apart from affordable purchase homes. He does not answer the question and he paints an entirely different picture.

While he was painting that different picture, he decided to home in on vacancy. This is a really good example of why what he is saying just feels like spin. At the moment, up to 100,000 vacant properties, in the middle of the biggest housing disaster, lie empty around the country while people are stuck at home in their childhood bedrooms or are experiencing homelessness, and the Government introduced the most pathetic excuse for a vacancy tax, at 0.3% at a time when house price inflation was at 10%. It then put it at zero-point-something-else percent in the budget. If it wanted to tackle vacancy to try to actually bring those homes back into use, it would have matched the rate to, at the very least, the rate of house price inflation.

What it has done is introduce an incentive to continue sitting on a vacant property. We could say the same for stamp duty. The Government could ban the bulk purchasing of homes if it introduced a tax with teeth but it has not done that. It creates all this spin and a picture of introducing a vacancy tax and stamp duty to prevent the bulk purchasing of homes but neither of them is effective because house price inflation is higher than the tax the Government has set for vacancy. That is one example.

I ask the Tánaiste to please go back to the question I asked about affordable purchase homes. The Government promised to deliver 50,000 of those. We have fewer than 1,000.

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