Irish Farmers’ Association (IFA) Farm Business chair, Bill O’Keeffe explained that this can be done by any individual by submitting an RZLT return on the RZLT portal through the Revenue online resources: myAccount or Revenue Online Service (ROS).
The IFA’s advice for those who are not familiar with these online portals is to engage professional accountancy services to make this return, he says. All submissions to local authorities in the February-March window should have received an acknowledgement of this by April 30. This acknowledgement must be included as part of the RZLT return to Revenue.
Commenting, Bill said: “IFA lobbied for a permanent exemption for actively farmed land throughout 2024. The exemption announced in the Budget 2025 speech is unsatisfactory as it only covers this year. The process places undue obligations on many hundreds of affected farmers who may have lands zoned without their knowledge. They are now under the scope of this unfair taxation and there were several hoops to jump through to avail of this one-year tax exemption”.
“A one-year exemption is not a solution. All actively farmed lands must be removed from the scope of RZLT permanently. Leaders of the three largest political parties – Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and Sinn Féin – gave a commitment to the IFA in advance of last year’s general election that they would remove actively farmed land from RZLT, but we have yet to see delivery on this commitment by the current Government.”
He has called on the Minister for Finance, Pascal Donohoe and the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, James Browne to recognise that the current approach is not the correct instrument to encourage greater delivery of housing.
“Affected farmers live in fear of the tax implications of RZLT and its introduction has not increased interest from potential buyers to purchasing zoned land in many cases. Housing developers, approved housing bodies, and financial lenders all recognise the RZLT liability associated with purchasing zoned land. They are standing back from purchasing zoned land in many cases, until the many other obstacles that are restricting housing development - finance, pre-planning investigations, labour and materials - are in place,” he said.