Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

In difficult circumstances, the Government has, on balance, done a good job with the resources it has. It is not simply a matter of a little for everyone; rather it is a matter of taking a look at the crisis we are in and making sure it does not derail the economy and plunge households and enterprises into a catastrophic crisis from which they may never recover.

I agree with the point made by Senator Casey on decoupling the provision of food and accommodation. I know that is easier said than done because a hotel bill is a hotel bill and covers both. In the past couple of days I had a problem with my mobile phone and had to spend the best part of 12 hours loitering around the Grafton Street area. I was struck by the number of businesses that are looking for staff. Staff are required everywhere. Since the Covid crisis the level of participation in the workforce has declined. Whether that is people who went home to eastern Europe or other parts of Europe or people who took a different pathway in their lives and took up educational endeavours, there is a huge shortage of staff in the city of Dublin. One only has to walk down to any street to see the notices on every window looking for staff. That is one problem.

The second problem is that many activities are highly dependent on keeping their energy costs reasonably low. I am talking about butchers' shops, small groceries with fridges, freezers and the like, restaurants with cooking facilities and so on. The crisis posed by massively increased energy prices is real and substantial. The Government has done a good deal to address that in a balanced way.

I welcome a number of measures, including the decision to reduce VAT to 0% for newspapers and online journals. Journalism is in crisis for various reasons, such as changing patterns of consumption and free social media, in particular as consumed by the younger generation. This step has long been advocated and I am glad the Government is taking it because we need newspapers, balanced opinion and a variety of sources for information and opinion on current affairs and all the other matters dealt with by the media.

I wish to discuss the vacant home tax. It is designed to apply a multiple of local property tax to vacant homes, and they are defined loosely as homes which, I presume, are capable of being occupied but are not occupied for more than 11 months in any given year. I note it is to be a self-assessed tax. What is the likelihood of somebody who had a home that was not occupied for 12 months of the year actually fessing up and saying they would like to pay three times the local property tax on it? It is a huge gamble on people's honesty that somebody would be asked to do that. Could the Minister enlighten me on one aspect? If a person had such a home and there was a member of his or her family, a relative or even a total stranger to which he or she gave occupancy for two months, even without receiving rent, does that let the person off liability for the vacant home tax? If it does, what are we talking about here? People will play a game with the Revenue and say their first cousin was making use of a property for six weeks in a given year or their nephew from Canada came over and stayed in the house. It seems to me to be codology.

What is really needed is something that is not easy and that has eluded successive Governments for a long time, which is to look to towns and cities and put in place a series of measures that would use up vacant and under-used space above shops. For example, Boyle in County Roscommon has shops with dried up flowers in their windows and a vacant look to their upper storeys. I have come to two conclusions. First, commercial rates are a serious matter for small shopkeepers and businesses occupying such premises. Second, letting out upper floors under the current regime of the safety provisions relating to landlords' liabilities mean people would have to put in fire escapes and a lot of other things, and invest a lot of money, to make properties available, and there would be no certainty that people would pay a sufficient rent to remunerate them. On vacant properties and homes, in fairness, this is a token gesture that will probably have no effect. I am not saying that it is easy to mobilise all those resources, but I believe very strongly that something along those lines should be done.

The Government made a strategic blunder in granting the right of tenure of indefinite duration to anyone who is a tenant of a domestic dwelling for more than six months. Landlords have left, and will continue to leave, on that account. The Government may offer all sorts of tax incentives to landlords, but the real issue is that landlords now realise that if they let a property for three years they will never get it back under the current law. I hope the Sinn Féin party will not take offence when I say that the situation will get even worse if its proposals are adopted because it would mean that people could not even get vacant possession for the purpose of selling a property.We have to change and reverse thrust, and at least give people who have invested in making one home available to other people the right to recover possession of it after three or five years, and with adequate notice periods, in order to ensure that private landlords remain engaged in the provision of rented accommodation.