Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Michael McGrath for bringing this Bill forward. He deserves credit for the work he has put into it. It is what we are supposed to be doing in here. Politicians tend to put a lot of their energies into other areas that are not necessarily fruitful in terms of how we legislate for the country and organise things. I would like to touch on some of the points the Deputy has raised.

With regard to the money message, has the Deputy's party challenged the Taoiseach? The media are fond of calling it the do-nothing Dáil. We could make it the do-something Dáil. I am surprised that the Taoiseach has not been more proactive. Is this going to go on forever? It is like a charade. There will be a queue of Bills. I heard a statistic that the amount of legislation going through the House in the last 12 months is at a record low. Has the Deputy's party challenged this situation? It has an arrangement with the Government. Is any progress being made in this area?

I have not read Deputy McGrath's Bill but I have every intention of reading every word of it. I will not go into my personal experiences. However, I have had experience of much of what is going to be in this Bill. While I am not going to personalise it, I am certainly going to use my experience to scrutinise the Deputy's Bill. I am looking forward to working through it.

The Deputy pointed out that in the first half of this year, 1,363 family homes were lost through sale, voluntary surrender or repossession. The Deputy has given the figures for the appeals system. Although 632 appeals were made since 2015, only 180 have been dealt with and 32% of them were successful in removing the veto. Can the Deputy identify why it is taking so long? Obviously, it is not rocket science in that we realise that the financial institutions, sadly, have played a game of breaking the individuals involved much of the time. I know many people who have committed suicide because of their problems with debt and the banks and how they were treated.

The Deputy made the point that while restructures are recurring and, in some cases, write-down deals have been done, it is inconsistent and unsatisfactory. The Deputy has never said a truer word. It has been like a beauty contest. I know of many deals that were done and of many that were not done, whether it was by NAMA or the pillar banks. It is so inconsistent. Does the Deputy agree that the lack of proper regulation of the area allows them to behave as they see fit and run it as a beauty contest? Sadly, from all that I have learned over the last few years around this whole area, especially with thousands of people from all over Ireland contacting us about NAMA and the banks, I cannot help feeling that this is a banana republic when it comes to how we do business at this stage.

We, in the Oireachtas, have been definitely negligent in that we have not dealt more cleanly with this. The history books will be unkind to this period of Irish life when they look back on it and on how the failure in banking led to the biggest financial crash and the biggest crash of all types in the history of our State. We made the least well off suffer the most as a result of it. Does the Deputy have any clear ideas as to how we deal with this overriding problem where, truth be told, we cannot tell the banks what to do despite the fact they would have been out of business only for the fact they were bailed out by the people?

The Deputy's Bill is certainly welcome even though I have not read it. The principle of it is definitely a progressive move. This will address some of our problems in this area. However, we hear about the constitutional challenge and we have heard so many pronouncements since we came in here in 2011 about what the Attorney General thinks about this, that or the other and never having to give us proof of how he or she has come up with the opinion. Given the Deputy's role as finance spokesperson within his party, does he have any plans as to how we deal with the overriding problems around all this?