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

I support the amendment, as I did the last one. I wish to signal that I may table an amendment on Report Stage.

I fundamentally oppose and object to the idea that people's mortgages can be bundled up and sold to vulture funds. That kind of carry-on produced a global economic crisis. I would like to see a regulation that precludes companies, firms or vulture funds which are not real companies in the proper sense from engaging in such activity. They are not interested in the customer, the consumer, the country or developing market relations even on a commercial basis. They are just vulture funds. I would prefer if the Central Bank of Ireland did not give these people the right to come in and buy bundles of mortgages. I am pretty certain that the Government is disposed to allowing this kind of thing in the belief that the global financial system works in this way and there is not much one can do about the situation. Therefore, at the very least, we should have the highest level of transparency and the greatest level of protection for customers and, potentially, victims of these firms. It seems entirely reasonable that people should be informed as soon as their mortgage is sold to one of these funds or sold to anybody. People should be told all of the rights they are entitled to in this situation and the discount that the vulture fund received. That is the point that Deputy Fleming made.

Let me outline what the Minister for Finance said before the Minister of State arrived. First, it was a demand made by some of the people who are in this position that they should be allowed, individually, to buy back their mortgages at the same discount as vulture funds. In some cases, people have even offered to pay more than the vulture funds were willing to pay. That means people were willing to pay over and above the discounted rate in order to get their mortgages back. It was in that regard that the Minister invoked the issue of moral hazard as the reason people could not buy their mortgages back. He said there would be other people who are paying the full amount of their mortgage repayments and asked why, therefore, we should facilitate individual mortgage holders in getting big discounts. There is a great inconsistency when it come to the invocation of the moral hazard argument, particularly when one considers the Siteserv case. In that sector there is no problem with moral hazard, and very wealthy people who owed money to-----