Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

With respect, just about every ordinary home owner has experience on a monthly basis of the huge trauma of meeting the cost of staying in a home. A minority of the bank's customers are in arrears. We can be certain that among those who are not in arrears are people who are struggling to meet their payments, and other aspects of family life are suffering because of the prices gouged from them during the bubble. The issue of strategic default is being suggested as a diversion from the fact that the majority of people are not strategic defaulters but are trying to survive. Some of these people are not in arrears and others are. When the practices, profiteering and speculation of the banking system and the financial markets plunge an entire society into the mess that the Irish people experienced, is it not reasonable for me, as a public representative, to expect the system to find a more global way out rather than the case-by-case approach which leaves people at the mercy of the banks?