Mr. Jerry Beades:

The owners have to be regulated. These are the people who own the loans and call the shots. What seems to have happened is that the owners have appointed agencies to administer the loans. The agencies are only pawns and have no say. They inspect the properties and report back and then they are told to close them down and send in a security man, for example. When we get into confrontation with them, they tell us they are not the owners of the loans. Sharp regulation is needed.

An organisation that is following all the activities of the vulture funds circulated among the members of the committee various papers, including "Towards Justice Centred Debt Solutions: An overview of the debt crisis in Argentina with recommendations for Ireland". The agency, called Debt and Development Coalition Ireland, is American and we stumbled on it by accident. It has a document entitled "From Puerto Rico to the Dublin Docklands" and another on corporate tax secrecy and Apple, which is very interesting.

The organisation pointed out to us at a meeting how a vulture fund bought the debt of a mine in Africa. The vulture fund just depopulated the whole village beside the mine and got away with doing so because it was in Africa. As someone said to me in Mayo, the vulture funds intend to depopulate every rural village in the west of Ireland. That is how serious the situation is. This is a humanitarian crisis and is not just a housing crisis and evictions. We need legislative reform. The problem is so vast that it is difficult to know where to start.