Ciarán Cuffe (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party)

I welcome the constructive debate we have had on this issue. I have taken notes of some of the contributions and I intend to feed them back into the ongoing process. It is not the first time we have had a good debate about the causes of oversupply in the housing market. We all have our pet blame for what went wrong and why. Within my own party, we put much of the blame at the door of excessive zoning of land, but there are many other issues, including development levies. In some counties there was far too much of a chase to get development levies and therefore to grant permission for development. That was part of the problem.

It is great to see almost a cross-party consensus that the tax incentives went too far in the final analysis. I re-read Charlie McCreevy's introduction of the levies when he essentially said that a rising tide would lift all boats. It did not. It was naive to assume that blanket tax designations would, at the stroke of a pen, transform local economies that had far more deep-seated socioeconomic challenges than simple tax incentives could cure.

The media were not mentioned, but the glowing tones with which the property supplements greeted every new development in the latter part of the boom contributed significantly to the problem. We like to blame banks for throwing mortgages at people, but the media threw homes at people. They made people feel a bit stupid if they did not have at least one property, if not several.