Maurice Quinlivan (Limerick City, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank Mr. Hall for the presentation, which was very interesting. He came up with some simple and practical solutions that should be implemented pretty much straight away. I was taken by his statement that 20% of those who were surveyed recently had mental health problems and a huge number of them had contemplated taking their own lives in the past four weeks. Obviously, we all deal with problems involving people who present themselves at our constituency offices. I have never held a constituency clinic without somebody coming to it with mortgage distress. It is a massive problem.

The head of the Housing Agency appeared before the committee at a previous meeting. He basically urged the committee to get the Government to make addressing this massive issue its highest priority. The Central Bank said that 88,292 people were in mortgage arrears in the first quarter of this year. Homes are being repossessed from or surrendered by four families per day.

The number of people in mortgage arrears doubled under the previous Government while non-bank lenders hold almost 46,000 mortgage accounts for principal dwelling houses and buy-to-let combined, which is a massive problem. What would Mr. Hall's simple solution be to the mortgage-to-rent process given it does not work well? How would he speed up? What would he do to make sure people in mortgage distress can access the scheme as quickly as possible?