Vacant Properties
Dail Éireann — 2026-09-29
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Simon Harris (FG), Wicklow

I fully understand and agree that vacancy and dereliction are two different things, but the taxes are all aimed at the same purpose of making sure that we get homes back into use. A tax of vacant residential property is one policy tool to address vacancy but it is also a behavioural change tax. It is about making sure that people do not leave houses in vacancy. We would expect, when we bring in a tax, that behavioural change will start to take effect.
I take the Deputy's point. He referenced the 70,000 figure while also acknowledging that there may be many that do not meet the definition of vacancy. When Revenue looked through all of this, as the Deputy will remember when all of this was introduced, it wrote to around 25,000 property owners who were potentially within the scope of the vacant homes tax. Many of the property owners declared them as being occupied and for the first chargeable period of the tax, there were about 6,800 properties declared as vacant. Some 2,800 of them claimed an exemption from the tax. In the first chargeable period, which went from November 2022 to October 2023, there were 3,910 properties liable for the vacant homes tax. That reduced in the next chargeable period to 2,357. In the third chargeable period, from November 2024 to October 2025, there were 1,655 properties liable. Therefore, we see this as a tax that is actually bringing about behavioural change. The next focus from a Revenue perspective and a Government perspective will be tackling what we believe to be the bigger issue around derelict properties.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-09-29/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-10-05T01:00:59+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-09-29