Finance Bill 2022: Second Stage Seanad Éireann — 2022-11-29 ============================================================ Michael McDowell (IND), National University of Ireland Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire Stáit. Tosóidh mé leis an vacant property tax. This is a joke and it is a sick joke as well. The Government is putting this forward as a measure that is supposed to increase the number of properties available for rent, I presume, or else for sale in any given year. Let us, though, be clear about what we are dealing with now. We are dealing with a deeply ideologically confused Government. I am not referring to the Minister of State in this respect. I think he is clear minded on the subject. Some of his colleagues, however, need to take a look in the mirror. We have changed the law in the last two years to provide that people letting houses for more than six months face the situation where they cannot, under any circumstances, get back those homes from the tenants, except for four stated reasons. Once people are there, they are there forever, effectively, unless landlords require vacant possession for one of four reasons. One of these is the desire to sell the house with vacant possession. The result has been that a large proportion of the houses that are now for sale - it is roughly 50% - are now being sold by landlords. The Government has now said it is worried about the increase in rents. If the size of the stock of rentable properties is diminished in the way it is being done now, the inevitable consequences are that we will have rising rents. There is no way out of this. If we cut the number of houses available for rent, and many people cannot afford to buy houses for one reason or another, then rents will increase. There was no need to do this. Worse still, the Sinn Féin Party is proposing that it would not even be possible for people to get back their properties for the purposes of selling them with vacant possession. This means it would only be possible to recover possession of one's property if it was intended to redevelop it or spend a huge amount of money refurbishing it, in which case, under the present law, there is a requirement to offer it back to the original tenant. This also means that we are in the situation now which means that tenants, under the laws brought in by this Government I am sad to say, can bring in fellow tenants and landlords are not entitled to object to this process unless it is possible for them to show reasonable cause as to why those fellow tenants should not be regarded as tenants. The original tenants then depart the scene. What kind of results do we think this creates for most landlords? They are effectively being dispossessed of their properties and being told in rent pressure zones, RPZs, that they must continue to let the properties at way below their market value in circumstances where the alternative is to sell. The inevitable consequences is that these properties will be sold. Through the Minister of State, then, I wish to tell the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, to get his act together. If he wants private landlords to make properties available for letting, then he should do something to help them. The steps in this Bill do not do anything for landlords looking five or ten years ahead and wondering whether they will have a valuable asset at the end of the time. I wish to lay it down on the line that this is an opportunity missed. The remedial measures in the form of the vacant property tax will do nothing. I looked at the Bill, and for a house to be deemed vacant it must have been unused as a dwelling, by whomever, it does not matter if it is the owner or not who uses it as a dwelling, for less than 30 days in a year. This is so easily avoided. An owner's child could be asked to dwell in a house for a few weeks and the property owner then escapes this measure. The penalty provided here is that instead of local property tax the owner is obliged to pay four times the amount of the local property tax charge. This is the great incentive to get people to let their properties on the open market. Landlords are not stupid. They are intelligent people. They have an asset. In many cases, it is probably people's only major asset and their retirement fund. These people are now seeing their assets being slowly expropriated by this Government because of deep ideological confusion. Additionally, if Sinn Féin gets anywhere near the levers of power, then these people will be completely expropriated. If we look at the figures, they are shocking. Some 5,600 landlords have left the market this year. Half the houses on the market are accounted for by landlords selling off their property. The response of this Government has been to say we will have a vacant property tax. I can imagine it might apply to some multinational American company holding on to a block of flats that was empty or something like that and in that case it might persuade the organisation to get off its backside and let its property. I can imagine that it could, possibly, have that effect, although I do have a doubt about this aspect as well. In the real world, however, in which most of us live, this measure will have no effect at all. It will be easily avoided and it is just there as a piece of propaganda being thrown out to allow the Government to say it has introduced a vacant property tax. I would love to see what the yields of this self-assessed tax will be in two years' time. Nobody in their right mind, if they had a vacant property, would allow it to be totally vacant for the prescribed period. It is so easy to avoid the tax. One does not even have to be the occupier. A friend or a friend's child could be asked to live in the property for a few weeks, thereby avoiding the tax completely. This is propaganda and a sticking plaster solution to a real problem. I am sorry if I am concentrating on one aspect of the Bill, as there are good aspects to it and important things are being done, which I support. Our function in respect of finance Bills is pretty minimal in the Seanad. I am laying it on the line. The vacant property tax is a sick joke and is a stunt by a government that is deeply confused about the residential property market and the shortage of rentable accommodation, in particular. I ask, through the Chair, that a message be relayed to the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien: get your act together and act sensibly and in the real world. This is fantasy politics. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2022-11-29/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:51:20+00:00 Sitting date: 2022-11-29