DUBLIN CITY COUNCILLORS have voted to maintain the Local Property Tax at its minimum level after a debate over whether to keep the tax low or to increase it to raise funds to clean up the capital.

The LPT  is an annual charge on all residential properties in the State which came into effect in 2013. Essentially, if you own a property you must pay the tax.

The amount you pay is based on the value of your property, which is self-assessed. There are 20 different LPT bands to cover increasing property values.

The LPT is designed so that it has a base rate but may be modified at the discretion of local authorities who can increase or decrease the base rate by 15%.

For example, based on Revenue’s Local Property Tax calculator, a person who owns a property in Dublin City Council valued at €350,001-€437,500 pays LPT at €405 per year, which reduces to €344 if councillors vote to reduce it by 15%. 

In DCC there has been an annual debate over whether councillors should exercise this discretion and keep the tax at the minimum level or use it to raise additional funds for the council’s coffers. Each year it has been kept at the minimum. 

Those who favour increasing it say that the 15% change is marginal compared to the overall cost of the tax and that collecting it would mean a cleaner city. 

Dublin City Council management proposed hiring around 100 new staff to do street cleaning in the city.

All it took was for councillors to stop voting to cut the Local Property Tax this year.

And in the last few minutes, a majority voted to cut it. No new cleaning staff, so.🤦‍♂️

— Michael Pidgeon (@Pidge) October 2, 2023

Councillors were told at a meeting last night that a proposal was on the table to recruit dozens of workers to clean public streets in Dublin city centre using revenue raised from the property tax.

The number of cleaning jobs that would be created would be between 90 and 105.

Councillors were split over whether to increase the property tax and allocate the funds to cleaning after a summer of public discontent with the state of Dublin’s streets, or to keep it low amid the cost of living crisis.

Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil, Sinn Féin and People Before Profit were in the unusual position of being in agreement with each other by all refusing to support an increase in the tax.

Fianna Fáil Councillor Deirdre Heaney called it a “very unfair tax on Dublin citizens” and said the party would not be supporting an increase.

“The cost of living and the cost of property in Dublin is much higher in Dublin than it is anywhere else in the country,” she said.

Councillor Cieran Perry, speaking for the Independent Group, said that Independents did not have a “unified position” on the matter but that his view was that he would not back a “home tax increase on our constituents during the cost of greed crisis”.

“It isn’t a progressive tax as it doesn’t take into account ability to pay and it is a disproportionate burden on households with lower incomes,” he said.

There's nothing worse than the desperation of Greens, L and SD Cllrs on here saying "but it's only €5 euro a month!" When discussing LPT. Anything in isolation, seems minor.

LPT should never, and will never save the city. Your parties destroyed that idea a long time ago.

— Cllr Hazel De Nortúin (@HazelPBP) October 3, 2023

However, the Green Party, Labour Party and the Social Democrats sought to bolster the tax to raise €14.5 million for the council.

Councillor Darcy Lonergan of the Green Party said: “The streets of Dublin are an extremely valuable asset. They have been walked on by and will continue to be walked by by generations of Irish people and by people around the world.”

They’re how we travel to work, how we socialise, where we go to celebrate, especially the recent sporting events that we have. Yet our own people are describing our streets as dirty, sticky, an old town, and smelly.

She added: “Councillors have spent hours talking about how dirty the streets have been and now we have the opportunity to actually do something about it,” she said.

“The DCC have been trying their best to clean it as much as possible, but they’ve been very, very clear on what they need. We need more resources and we need more people on the ground and for that, we need more money.”

- With reporting by Rónán Duffy