Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The crisis of mortgage distress is a disaster that will soon turn into a catastrophe. More than 160,000 families are suffocated with an unsustainable debt burden and the number is rising by approximately 800 every week. Nothing has been done. After two years in government there is no let up on the deepening of this crisis. The Government refuses - for reasons I cannot understand - to assert the control it has over the banks that we bailed out and where the Government is the major shareholder to simply tell them to sort this problem out by writing off unsustainable debt.

The economy is being utterly suffocated. It is not just the enormous distress and anxiety that the families directly affected are going through, but the entire economy is being suffocated because of the problem. If the Government is the major shareholder in the banks that we have bailed out why can it not simply tell them to write off the debt or restructure it in a sustainable way? It is inexplicable.

I accompanied a family with a distressed mortgage to AIB last week. The bank accepted that the mortgage was unsustainable and that something should be done but could not tell us what it would be. Someone muttered something about long-term forbearance. It was said, unbelievably, three times during the course of the meeting that the family might win the lotto in the next few years. Is our policy for dealing with mortgage distress or the effect it is having on the economy to hope that the country will win the lotto or that all of the people in mortgage distress will win the lotto? They are not going to win the lotto; the Government must make the banks do the right thing and sort out the problem.

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