Peter Mathews (Dublin South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I appreciate the kindness of the Vice Chairman in letting me ask one or two questions.

On debt sustainability, I know the focus has been on sovereign debt. However, Ireland is the country which has been most crushed and burdened by debt, even more so than Japan. The paper produced by the Bank for International Settlement economists for a conference in Wyoming in the United States in August 2011 tabulated the 18 nations in the OECD. Ireland was not even considered in that exercise, but when one superimposes or introduces household debt and non-financial corporate debt, we are way ahead of anyone else. That is the problem because in addition to the sovereign debt that must be repaid and serviced from tax revenue and the things the troika is asking us to do, households are crushed by debt that will become multi-generational. That is what is wrong. We have 130,000 people with problematic mortgage loans and there are far more beyond. With the insolvency law we are only putting a toe in the water in terms of what needs to be done. That is what I feel professionally and from my experience and that is what Deputy Joe Higgins means when he refers to ivory towers. It is not meant to be in any way deprecating to the delegation. The Deputy acknowledges and salutes the work done by the council. He was the only politician in the European Parliament who more than two years ago asserted to the President of the European Commission that it was wrong for citizens to be saddled with debts arising from the private banking sector collapse. That was the only time the president lost his temper, not because Deputy Joe Higgins was rude but because he spoke the truth. That is what is so telling in all of this. I ask the leaders and finance Ministers of all countries to come together to honestly add up the bill and possibly mutualise and perpetualise it in 2.5% consoles. They should add up the bill - be it €3 trillion or €4 trillion or perhaps €5 trillion - sweep out the balance sheets and start from scratch.

As regards the macroeconomic wheels, we know society likes to have three platforms in providing support - education, health and social welfare - for those who are temporarily out of work. If one thinks it through, this can only be funded from income - corporate, individual and household. In conurbations and places where people live, they live in properties which command a market rent. Every property does, regardless of whether it is a farm, a factory, an office or a school. There is an economic rent. The site values of these properties are the residual values from the capitalisation of the yields-----