RTE 1: Claire Byrne Live features Irish Mortgage Brokers, 17th September 2018

We took part in a panel discussion about the ‘take back the city’ campaign. While we are in favour of solutions to housing shortages, taxing dereliction and land, we are not in favour of taking people’s property. This has to be balanced against why property rights were established in this country and we also questioned why they went after private property rather than the abundant and abandoned state owned property which includes council owned homes that are not being used.

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Claire Byrne Live ‘The Paradise Papers’ explained 6th November 2017

Our compliance manager Karl Deeter was on Claire Byrne Live on RTE 1 last night to explain the ‘Paradise Papers’. This was a cache of documents that helped to expose tax avoidance on a large international scale. He explained the difference between avoidance and evasion as well as asking whether or not these papers were ‘good’ because if a person didn’t break the law should they lose the right to privacy?

These papers are likely to expose actual evasion and on that basis they need to be examined, we are confident that the news coming out of the Paradise Papers is far from over.

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McWilliams Ireland: Are we in a property bubble? (2nd November 2017)

David McWilliams’s show ‘Ireland’ looked at the issue of property prices here and asked if we are in a ‘bubble’. He spoke to Karl Deeter from Irish Mortgage Brokers about this who made two points. The first was that we are too late to change the outcome of the property cycle, the second was that the biggest land hoarders in the state is the state itself and that Government should release land to flood the land market and drive down the primary costs of construction.

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Primetime features Irish Mortgage Brokers on property tax, 26th September 2017

We were pleased to take part in a debate about property tax on Primetime this week. The main point we would hope to make is that property tax based on market values should naturally rise when prices rise the same as income tax paid increases as income goes up, this is the logical conclusion in our view. Some people don’t want it to go up even after it was artificially frozen for political reasons several years ago, we see this for what it is, electioneering and populism. Strong municipal and local government need this funding and should be allowed to decide the sums for themselves, keeping it artificially low only creates a different set of problems in the future.

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TV3 Late Review, discussion on ‘a constitutional right to housing’

In this piece we were asked to contribute to a conversation on the constitutional right to housing. Maeve Regan from The Mercy Law Resource Centre discussed the merits of the idea which was put forward by the charity she heads up, while Karl Deeter took the view that an addition to the constitution of a right to housing won’t resolve the problem and that the right already exists.

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