Dessie Ellis (Dublin North West, Sinn Fein)

Sinn Féin welcomes the Family Home Protection (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill and commends Deputy Stephen Donnelly for introducing it.

The Bill is a conservative measure in terms of the overall package of mechanisms that are needed to address the problem of not only home repossessions, but arrears in general, and negative equity. If enacted, it would allow a judge the authority to consider a range of factors when a lender is seeking repossession of a family home. Under the current legal framework, where a person is in any arrears and the lender seeks repossession, the court must comply with the request, regardless of any other factors it may wish to consider. It does not matter whether this loan was given irresponsibly in the first place, whether any reasonable person or institution would have looked at the borrower's financial circumstance and realised he or she would never be able to repay that loan. It does not matter whether the lender complied with the code of conduct on mortgage arrears or whether the lender has had any interaction whatsoever with borrowers in terms of trying to help keep them in their home, or of how much they owe on their home loan or whether they would sometime in the future be able to pay this off.

Not all lenders take that attitude but I am sure there are members of the Judiciary who preside over repossession cases who only wish they could turn back the clock and ensure that the likes of Start Mortgages, notorious for issuing repossession proceedings, never existed. While not all lenders are out to get the borrowers - one cannot help but think that this is because the banks cannot sell repossessed properties even if they want to - we should all take careful note of the actions of banks which lead to people not being able to keep up their mortgage repayments due to repeated increases in interest rates of variable rate mortgages.

I want to take this opportunity to place this Bill within the broader issue of the right to housing in the context of over-indebtedness. This State never incorporated the right to housing in its domestic legislative framework. Not alone that, it also opted out of Article 31 of the European Social Charter which affords the right to housing. We have an out-of-date legal system that is not fit to deal with or provide adequate solutions to the problems of our time. While some people went crazy borrowing, the Government down through the years allowed a culture of consumer borrowing to develop on a property market built on sand.

This over-borrowing, in tandem with banks throwing money at people like there was no tomorrow, brought us to the catastrophic level of mortgage arrears and insolvency, voluntary surrendering of homes and house repossessions.

A total of 170,000 people are in mortgage arrears of 90 days or more. That is 8.1% of every mortgage and represents an almost 60% increase in two years. It is a scandal that the Government parties fought an election campaign telling people that they would help them, and then almost a year later have done very little, aside from publishing a long overdue scheme of a personal insolvency Bill.

See this speech in context