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

Professor Honohan said there are three modes by which the crisis mortgages can be resolved, the third of which is eviction. All of these modes are to the advantage of the banks. The Central Bank contemplates no general write-down for ordinary homeowners in serious negative equity, whether or not they are in arrears. Many people who are not in arrears are in deep hardship trying to make their monthly payments. In 2010, Professor Honohan was instrumental in bouncing the Fianna Fáil-Green Party Government - admittedly hapless, punch drunk and bedraggled - into going for a bailout and the troika programme.

It is not a bailout of the taxpayers or of the Irish State incidentally, but a bailout of the big European institutions and bondholders who had gambled wildly in the Irish property market. This has led to a consequence of further austerity that is still grinding down our economy and our people. Professor Honohan was prepared, along with his colleagues in Europe, to allow the private debts of the perpetrators to be underwritten on the backs of the Irish working class people, but there was nothing whatsoever for the victims who are the mortgage holders and the young generation of workers who were blackmailed into paying these horrific speculative prices for property.

I would like to comment on split mortgages. Can anybody contemplate the vista of people having these debts hung around their necks for the next 40 years until they are into their 70s or even 80s? Apart from the morality of this, it is clear that this is a huge drag on our economy, which is still bouncing around the bottom. A write-down to the current value of people's homes, and therefore a write-down of the monthly repayments, should be how we overcome this problem in a global sense, while releasing billions that will go into the real economy and help to revive it. Why does Professor Honohan not contemplate that?