Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein)

I move amendment No. 21:

In page 43, between lines 34 and 35, to insert the following: “Report on policy objectives and financial safeguards for Living Cities Initiative

30. The Minister shall, within 1 month of the passing of this Act, prepare and lay before Dáil Éireann a report on policy objectives and the financial safeguards that are in place given the scale of the reform and expansion of the scheme in terms of eligibility and granting access to developers to the scheme.”.

This amendment relates to the living cities initiative. This initiative has never taken off. If I am right, it was the brainchild of John Moran when he worked with the then Minister, Michael Noonan. He is now the directly elected mayor of Limerick. I could be wrong on this but I think it was focused on Limerick, inner-city Dublin and Georgian buildings. It did not really take off. Nearly every single Finance Bill was amended to expand the scope and criteria. The scheme has had an extremely low uptake. It is now being expanded again to include five other towns. From recollection, I believe that includes a town in my own county of Donegal. I have made the point that, based on the criteria, an argument could be made to allow Ballybofey, which probably has more vacancies than any other town in the county, to benefit from the initiative. The real issue here is that the scheme is being massively expanded. It is no longer just for Georgian buildings or buildings built before 1914 or whatever it was. It now applies to buildings built before 1974 or 1975. It was a date in that range. In some cases, there is no time limit whatsoever.

When we debated this many years ago, the then Minister, Michael Noonan, said that with things like this, you bring them in, you review them, and if they are not working you get rid of them. He was making the point that you have to take a risk with some of these schemes. That is fine. I understand that you have to take a risk with schemes but you also have to ensure there are safeguards in place. The amendment is based on the scale of the reform, the expansion of eligibility for the scheme and developers being granted access to the scheme. That was an anti-avoidance measure. It was explicitly made clear that developers would not be allowed in this scheme. They are now being allowed in the scheme under the amendment included in the Finance Bill. We need to ensure that there are financial safeguards and that the objectives are met. I want to see a report in relation to that. What assessment is going to be carried out in that regard? What early warning signals will let us know if this expansion is being exploited in a way that does not meet the objectives of the scheme? When are we likely to see some concrete data in relation to all of that?

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