AnnualDinner: The guest speaker at the Society of Chartered Surveyors annual dinner used the occasion to fire a broadside at stamp duty and to criticise the Government for not solving the M50 toll bridge issue sooner.

Stamp duty is the "most outlandish stealth tax" applied in Ireland today, according to leading property developer Sean Dunne. It is time the Government gave what amounts to a land tax back to Irish housebuyers.

Dunne, who recently paid €260 million for the Jurys Doyle hotel site in Ballsbridge, Dublin 4, made his comments at the Society of Chartered Surveyors annual dinner.

He fired a broadside at Government policy on the Republic's high stamp duty. He also used the occasion to take a swipe at stockbrokers and banks who he described as "harbingers of doom and gloom", equating them to laughing hyenas. He also argued that the failure to solve congestion on the M50 toll bridge was costing the State €206 million per annum in lost time.

"The extortionately high rate of stamp duty in this country is an issue which is close to the heart of all housebuyers," he told those attending last Thursday's dinner.

The 9 per cent rate introduced in 1997 prohibited mobility in the housing market, fuelled house price inflation and had driven 70 per cent of Irish property investment into foreign markets, he said.

"Stamp duty has been the greatest cash-cow that our Government has ever put to pasture - and the facts speak for themselves," he stated.

Stamp duty on land and property in 1993 amounted to €127 million. "Figures for 2005 reveal that stamp duty receipts in relation to land and property will net the Government €2 billion, a 16-fold increase," Dunne said.

Duty recovered from residential property alone amounted to €950 million last year. Stamp duty was "nothing but land tax or, more importantly, a property tax", he added.

"Stamp duty is the most outlandish stealth tax in Ireland today, especially when we consider the statistics that Irish householders now move home on average up to three times in their lifetime," Dunne said. "There is no other category of taxation in Ireland which has yielded such massive and healthy returns for the exchequer."

He called on the society's members and the property industry as a whole to put pressure on the Government to drop to "at worst" the 1997 rate of 6 per cent or ideally to the UK's 4 per cent rate in next December's budget.

A family moving home or trading up to a €650,000 home would contribute €58,000 "to the Government coffers", he said. "When one then adds the €77,000 Vat which the Government takes out of a new house it shows how totally distorted the tax take by the exchequer is."

It was time for the Government "to give back to the Irish housebuyers and homeowners", he said. Since its introduction in 1997 house prices in Ireland had risen by 241 per cent nationally and 294 per cent in Dublin, "proof positive that it has fuelled house prices by restricting mobility".

In his address, Dunne criticised the dire predictions coming from stockbrokers, banks and think tanks, who he likened to laughing hyenas and "harbingers of doom and gloom".

For the past six years "every economist associated with every stockbroker in Ireland mistakenly forecast the end of the housing and property boom in Ireland", he stated.

They had been "vociferous and repetitive", in the process encouraging outside commentators, including the Economist, the IMF and the OECD to issue warnings about Irish house prices being over valued.

He added, however, that the "hyenas have stopped laughing", stating: "Each and every one of them was wrong, instead the price and supply of housing units has continued to break records."

Commenting on roads infrastructure, Dunne argued that the M50 should in time be connected into a ring by tunnelling underneath Dublin Bay. It would require a 6km stretch from the north port to Loughlinstown.

He suggested a "silver bullet" solution to the M50 congestion problem by immediately opening the WestLink toll plaza and then contracting its operator, NTR, to run the new barrier-free tolls. For this it could receive the same income currently generated by the plaza itself. "I see no reason why the Government should wait until 2008 to open the WestLink," he stated.

The congestion at the plaza represented a cost to the State in lost working hours worth more than €206 million, he told the dinner. This was based on each vehicle experiencing an average 15-minute delay while carrying an average of 1.25 passengers.

This represented 31,250 man-hours lost per day, with the total annual loss based on the average industrial hourly labour wage of €30.

The lost labour per year, if it could be applied to housebuilding, would deliver 4,600 housing units, Mr Dunne maintained.