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

The Technical Group were the first people to raise this issue and to table a motion in the Dáil in April 2011. Nothing has been done about the crisis since and it has become worse. People have been clinging on for the past two years. It is evident to me and many other Members that the crisis is coming to a head.

The Government’s strategy has demonstrably failed. The banks came before the Joint Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform and played us for fools. We got claptrap about them wanting to engage with people. From the evidence coming through my clinic door I know that the opposite is true; that people are trying to engage with the banks but the banks are not interested in engaging with them at all. They are just interested in sending out legal letters or making threats in order to squeeze as much money out of people as they possibly can.

I wish to underline the point Deputy Catherine Murphy made about the stupidity of repossessions. We will pick up the tab if people’s houses are repossessed because we will have to provide them with social housing. It will cost us to do that. When we say the banks have to take a hit and write down unsustainable debt the Government says we cannot do that because it would cost the taxpayer but it will cost us if people’s houses are repossessed because we will have to pay for the social housing or the funding of it. We must force the banks to provide sustainable solutions for people in the interests of mortgage holders but also in the interests of the wider economy. There is a simple solution, namely, to do what they did in Norway – write down unsustainable mortgages to the market value plus 10%. Nobody’s house would be repossessed and one would impose the solution on the banks instead of the banks playing us for fools and terrorising tens of thousands of ordinary families.

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