Vacant Homes Tax: Motion [Private Members] Dail Éireann — 2023-04-19 ============================================================ Chris Andrews (SF), Dublin Bay South Sorry, the state of Palestine. At least someone was listening to me. We must recognise the state of Palestine. The previous Minister for Foreign Affairs, Deputy Coveney, said that he might have recognised the Palestinian state if progress towards a two-state solution had stalled. It cannot get any more stalled than it is now. We have an extreme, fascist Israeli Government. Members of the Israeli Government were not fit to do military service. Have I used up my time? How can it not be policy when, in a crisis where we have upwards of 80,000, 90,000 or 100,000 homes sitting without families in them, families in this State are literally being told to go to police stations? If the Minister believes, as we do, that this is a crisis, which I must assume he does, then he must act. We are not saying this is the panacea. We are not saying that enacting the single measure we are bringing forward today will solve the crisis. We are saying this will make a difference. The Government asks us to bring solutions. The Taoiseach and Tánaiste regularly throw stones at the Opposition and say we bring no solutions. We are using our Private Members' time to tell the Minister his Government's tax is ineffective. The people do not have time for a review, so we are saying the Minister should increase the tax. He should make it 10%. Let us reanimate those homes. Let us incentivise people who have the luxury of sitting on vacant homes while others are sitting in police stations, to rent them, sell them and get families into them. We do not have time for a review. This is a solution. If it falls on deaf ears, I promise the Minister this will be a policy the Social Democrats will bring to the table in government. --- 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/dail/2023-04-19/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:51:47+00:00 Sitting date: 2023-04-19