Vulture fund tax break
Deputy Doherty attacks a late Government amendment he says gives vulture funds a tax break to buy homes during the housing crisis. Deputy Ryan defends the Government’s social and local-authority housing approach and rejects the claim of a split in motives.
Last night, the Government pulled a political stroke by forcing through a last-minute amendment that gave a tax break to vulture funds to buy up thousands of homes throughout the State, pushing up house prices and outbidding first-time buyers. We really could not make this up. In the middle of a housing crisis, when the Minister knows and every person in the House knows that young people are locked out of affordable housing, that people cannot pay the cost of them and that there is a scarcity of housing, the Government unleashed these vulture funds to wreak havoc in the housing market by buying up these homes from under the noses of aspiring home owners. It has now given them a tax break to do so. Let there be no doubt that while the Government won the amendment last night, and the vulture funds and cuckoo funds won the amendment last night, it was the ordinary people of this city and the State who lost out. It was aspiring home owners who lost out, it was first time buyers who lost out, it was renters who lost out and it was the taxpayers who lost out. Will the Minister explain why the Green Party adopted this shameful position?
Comment on this
The Deputy knows as well, in turn, that our interests are with the local authorities and approved housing bodies in delivering social housing. The Deputy knows this is the interest of every party in the House. I cannot accept this type of definitive split that people on one side of the House are in favour of vulture funds, cuckoo developers or others, and the rest of us are all in favour of social housing and approved housing bodies. We all have this similar interest in mind.
It is the same in respect of the particular difficulties in local authorities and in meeting the interests of young people. We have the exact same interest in providing for young people as the Deputy's party does. Yes, we will look to change, as we are doing in Government, the mechanisms by which we do it. We do not agree on all the policies that have been there in the past but we are working to change them, and we will, in a way that is for the better of young people.