Mr. Edmund Honohan:

To go back to the NAMA legislation, there was a hard fought case and the Supreme Court was happy to authorise very wide-ranging jurisdiction to the Minister and NAMA to acquire all sorts of loans, including rubbish loans, good loans and bad loans, and to allow the Minister to designate by statutory instrument what types of portfolios might be acquired.

The objective was clear, namely, to prune the bad banks and hand over their bad portfolios. Once the objective is identified, and provided that the measure being proposed tallies with it and is not disproportionate, the court will be happy to deal with it.

There seems to be a distinction between rent control and rent certainty. Rent certainty is a measure that the landlord community has swallowed so far, but it is technically a limitation on their property rights, as are many other measures, for example, capital acquisitions tax, controls on interest rates, etc. All of these are in the nature of measures that, socially, society should adopt for the common good. It is difficult to see how there could be a challenge to rent certainty, which is simply a fixity of terms, to revert to the Land League. Having gone through the cauldron of the Supreme Court twice, it is difficult to envisage it turning around and saying that it will let rent control through this time. The courts generally have difficulty in rewriting old decisions. The legislation would have to be finely taut.

Regarding vacant units, in the executive summary the phraseology that I used carefully was "by compulsorily acquiring unoccupied and occupied homes about to be "repossessed"." If one reverts to the question of by how much will the public housing segment of the market expand, one must say that many people will lose their houses through repossession. How does one define the group of housing that it would be in the public interest to have in the public housing portfolio? It is "any housing that is likely to be of use". Vacant housing is likely to be of use, as is housing where the owners unfortunately have been served with a notice to quit effectively or a demand for possession. Once their right to redeem has been extinguished, the title deeds vest permanently in the mortgagee. It is at that point that the State can say it will acquire all of those without exception. It is a big bang. We acquire them all, we pay off the previous owners and now we decide what to do with them. Then we are into a different area.

An important byproduct of this relates to people who are in mortgage arrears. If the State steps in and buys all of the properties that have been the subject of demands for possession or possession proceedings, we have an instant freeze on all dispossessions and evictions. When we sit back and ask what we will do with them then, the answer is to negotiate and put in place the mortgage-to-rent scheme that was proposed several years ago. We will have the option of taking that portion of the houses that we will acquire by compulsory purchase, flipping them over and renting them to the people living there.