Minister of State Ossian Smyth has expressed amazement at reports of plans to postpone the Residential Zoned Land Tax.
“I was amazed to read this. I didn't see that coming at all,” he told RTÉ radio’s Today with Claire Byrne show.
“Just to be clear, obviously we have a housing crisis. And yet Ireland is a country that has a lot of land. And so part of the Housing for all Strategy three years ago was that we passed a law which said that people, if they were found to be hoarding land, land that's both zoned for housing and provided with services that they would have to pay a tax.
“The idea was when we passed that law, we said, anybody who owns this land, you've got two years, to get ready. In other words, you got two years to either start building on the land, or to dezone the land, or else if you don't want to do that, sell on the land, if you don't want to build on it, you can pay the tax.
“So that was basically the idea in 2021, 2023 came around, time to pay the tax. And the government decided to give people an extra year because they weren't ready. So we pushed it forward to three years. So now here we are three years later.
"I opened the newspaper the other day, and it says some politicians are thinking that we should do it another year. And I just thought that's the last thing that we should be doing right now.”
Mr Smyth denied that the government had made a decision on the issue. “It isn't the government. The government has already made a decision about this and has passed a law. So we have a policy. We have a law.”
The suggestion of deferring the tax for a further year was not something with which he could agree, he said.
“We've now gone through the exercise of mapping out the country and finding where are these land banks that are both zoned for residential housing and ready to build on, provided with services. And it turns out that there are 6500 hectares and it's enough land for 220,000 homes. So it would be absolutely transformative to provide that housing.”
These figures have been published and were available as every local authority had been obliged by law to publish a map indicating what land was available zoned for housing but had not yet been built upon.
“So we're holding back. If we don't go ahead and do this we're holding back housing for 220,000 families. All the political parties are agreeing that we need to build 50,000 homes a year. Why would we delay this for a year? That's not the right answer.”
The majority of the land involved was not agricultural, he added. It was land outside of towns. Or State owned.
“Deferring the entire tax for a year because you found some hard cases that are the minority of people is not the right answer. So if there are people who want to come, if there are a proposals to identify somebody who is a hard case, who's being treated unfairly and that they need to have some kind of a pay off or an exemption, that's fine.
"But what we're not going to do is defer tax for a year. I would never accept that that's not going to happen.
“That suggestion, that the whole tax will be deferred for a year, 220,000 people are going to be denied their housing because a minority of people are being unfairly treated.”
The Green Party was open to finding a solution, he said. This was the case with all laws if it was found that there was a difficulty for some people who were being unfairly treated.
Farmers who had land that had been zoned for housing, could apply to have it dezoned, he said.
“We can we can find a solution to this problem. And if there's somebody in some particular situation which is really unfair, I'm sure we can find a way around this.
"But what we are not going to do is get rid of land hoarding tax, which could provide housing for 220,000 families simply because there is a small number of undefined cases.”
