Ceisteanna ar Pholasaí nó ar Reachtaíocht - Questions on Policy or Legislation
Dail Éireann — 2023-04-19
============================================================

Cian O'Callaghan (SD), Dublin Bay North

During the discussion this morning on the Social Democrats' vacant homes tax motion, the Minister for Finance was quite dismissive of the figure of 160,000 vacant homes identified by the census. He seemed to think that the figure included the homes of people who were on holidays for a few weeks, but this is not correct. For a vacant home to be classified as such, the census enumerator must visit it on several occasions and find that it is vacant and then must talk to the neighbours and get clarification that there is no one on holidays or some other reason for a short-term vacancy. Given that the Minister charged with implementing the vacant homes tax clearly does not understand the census data on vacancy, this raises the question as to whether the Cabinet understood the data when making its decision. Will the Government reconsider the derisory 0.3% tax and increase it to an effective rate?

---

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