Fine Gael TD Fergus O'Dowd has called for a tax on houses vacant for two years and more to help solve homelessness in the State.
“It will be a tax on an empty home and there should be no issue of somebody having died and the property not being sorted out,’’ he said.
“There should no issues with estate management and the division of property and stuff like that within the family.’’
Mr O’Dowd, who was speaking during the Dáil debate on the rent cap legislation, said other countries were dealing with the issue.
They included Britain, Scotland and Canada, he added.
“Where there is a significant shortage of houses, this has been introduced and it works,’’ Mr O’Dowd said.
He said it was an "undeniable, incontrovertible fact'' that the National Asset Management Agency (Nama) offered 6,890 family homes, dwellings or flats, 73 per cent of which were apartments, to local authorities up and down the country. Some 2,700 of them were accepted, he said.
Unfinished estates
Mr O’Dowd said Nama had made it exceptionally clear it would look at unfinished estates, offering to put them back into “shipshape so they could be used as dwellings’’.
Some 800 homes were turned down by some, not all, of the four local authorities in the greater Dublin area.
“That is 800 houses people could be in tonight as tenants,’’ he said.
“All of the homeless families in hotels in Dublin this very night could have been in council-owned or council-leased property if the councils had acted but they did not.’’
Mr O’Dowd said the health boards, Bus Éireann, Iarnród Éireann and a lot of State companies had land and was not being built on. In many cases, local authorities did not have the money to invest, he added.
“There is a very simple answer,’’ said Mr O’Dowd. “We should go for a public-private partnership.’’
Property sales
Fianna Fáil TD Kevin O'Keeffe said he had never been a fan of Nama.
“A Tupperware sale would give a better return to the Government than Nama’s property sales in the initial days,’’ he said.
He said he had watched some of the best buildings and property in the country being sold for nothing.
Independent TD Thomas Pringle said it had been estimated 23,000 or 24,000 landlords had left the rental market in recent years.
However, the number of tenancies had increased by more than 43,000 since 2011, he said.
“The landlords mentioned were probably all in the buy-to-let sector or were unintentional landlords,’’ said Mr Pringle.
