The Revenue Commissioners estimate that tax reliefs worth £5 million were claimed last year by investors in holiday homes in the designated seaside resorts. At this rate, the cost to the Exchequer in revenue foregone will amount to £15 million over the scheme's three-year life. Given that many of these clusters of holiday homes are blots on the landscape and that all of the investors are high-income earners, this particular tax incentive is an unwarranted subsidy to wealthy people for the acquisition of assets which may be environmental liabilities.

It would have been sensible to impose a levy of, say, £1 per square foot on each holiday home, with the revenue being used to build social housing for local people who now find themselves priced out of the market by soaring land and property values in the seaside resorts. Prof Frank Convery, director of the UCD Environmental Institute, pointed out that all of the gains under tax incentive schemes such as those in the resort areas are "captured by a small minority" while the community as a whole "bears the cost". And this doesn't make sense.