Paddy Burke (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State to the House. I welcome the Finance Bill and wish the Minister well with it.

I highlighted an issue concerning redundancies to the Minister of State, Deputy English, at a previous debate in the Seanad. There is a problem for small family-run businesses that are sole traders or self-employed and that employ people. The Redundancy Payments Act 2003 introduced the provision that two weeks per year must be paid in redundancy. It is right that a person who is made redundant gets two weeks per year. However, the sole trader or family-run business, who is self-employed and who employs people, must find two weeks per year to pay the redundancy whether he or she is downsizing or the business ceases. In the next number of months or whatever, a lot of those family-run small trader businesses will close, never to open again, but they will still have to pay redundancy. While at some stage they can claim an inability to pay and the State will take up the two weeks per year, in the case of the self-employed small or sole trader, the State comes looking for the money, and at the end of the day a charge is put on the private property - the house - of the sole trader.

I am bringing in a Private Members' Bill to exclude the family home in this case as it is only right it should be protected, and we have seen where it is protected in many cases. In this case, a small businessperson, a sole trader, who is self-employed and employing people can end up with a charge on his or her house, and when that person dies, the house goes to the State. It is something the Government should consider very seriously, and I hope it will take on board the Bill that I will propose.

My next issue concerns people who own two or three houses or apartments and want to make a business out of renting property. The Government has continually said that it does not want such activity as it drives up the price of property for first-time buyers and whoever else wants to buy a house. Many a family has made a living out of renting property but more and more of them are going out of business because of the taxation policy. They are being taxed to the hilt. I do not know what a person would want to be to buy property to rent but he or she would want to have cash and not to borrow.Those people are getting out of that business and the money that they are getting for their businesses is going into funds that buy houses but have no tax to pay, which is an inequity. While the person who buys one, two or three apartments, houses or whatever is being driven out of the market the funds are going back in to buy blocks of houses and hide behind real estate investment trusts or REITs and so forth but pay no tax. While the Minister for Finance has said that he does not want to use a taxation policy to interfere with the housing market, in effect he is because the REITs are buying houses and paying no tax. He should reduce the tax for the person who has a few properties and place some kind of tax on REITs and vulture funds that are now in the property game.

Banking has changed completely. Nobody is building houses now bar a few because it is not profitable to do so and it is hard to get funds. Bank managers used to take a chance on builders or whatever but that day is gone because there are no bank managers to talk to and the small builder who builds one or two houses finds it very difficult to get funds to do any development. This matter must be looked at because many a family has been reared by small builders and they owed a debt of gratitude to bank managers all around the country. Those bank managers are gone and small builders are going with them resulting in the ever-increasing cost of housing and everybody being pushed out of the market.