Rebecca Moynihan (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I will support the proposed Order of Business. I raise the changes in restrictions that will operate from Friday and the very unfair treatment of the live entertainment and music sector in comparison with nightclubs. It beggars belief that patrons will be able to dance in nightclubs but will have to remain seated at music gigs. Musicians and artists have suffered particularly badly over the course of the pandemic, having to reschedule shows and losing huge sums from doing so. It is a really unfair anomaly and it shows there was a lack of thought, with the proposals for the sector almost having been written on the back of a packet of cigarettes. I ask that the Government reconsider the restrictions requiring people to sit down during live music shows because it is particularly unfair on a sector that has suffered a great deal during the pandemic.

The second issue I raise relates to the National Asset Management Agency, NAMA, apartments in Finglas, which was reported in The Business Poston Sunday last by Killian Woods. For more than ten years, 26 apartments have lain empty. This underlines the need for not just a vacant lands tax but a vacant homes tax. Habitable residential houses and apartments have been lying empty for ten years and an arm of the State is sitting on empty property while children grow up in hotels just down the road.

There is an contradiction between how NAMA approaches this issue and the so-called Government commitment to home ownership. As can be seen in the marketing material for this Prospect Hill site, the agency is selling it directly to investors rather than owner-occupiers or individual people and is touting its potential rental income of more than €1 million a year. It is a great disappointment and a missed opportunity that an arm of the State, controlled by the Government, is selling on a group of apartments to investors and trying to trap people into long-term rental while, at the same time, that same State and Government are not giving renters tenancy and security of tenure. We need a wider debate on how NAMA has operated in the housing market and how it sees itself as a purely commercial vehicle rather than an organisation that has responsibility for a social good, that is, the provision of land and housing for people who live in this country.