Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I referred to it earlier but I am very disappointed that amendment No. 68 was ruled out of order. It was an honest attempt to deal with some of the issues which the Chairman addressed not long ago. We are not dealing with it. The banks have run amok and they are engaged in daylight robbery. The Taoiseach makes strong expressions to convey his angst. Yesterday I asked him if the Minister for Finance had attended the EGM of AIB last week, and he was not able to tell me, maybe the Minister will tell me here.

The culture of "softly softly" is still there. The Minister himself said that all is not well there. We know that. This amendment was an effort to do two things. Against the vulture funds and our home-grown banks, and we now have a home-grown Tipperary vulture fund which is amassing land, this was to try to give a reasonable chance to the owners of distressed loans, whether in the cases of property, farms, family homes, buy-to-let or whatever, these were people who got up in the mornings, borrowed money, had a business and then the crash happened, which was not their fault.

Like the Chairman, I voted for that bank guarantee, and what did we get for it only two fingers from every hand; if there were three hands we would get two fingers from each of them the whole time. We as a Parliament encounter this but so do the people the banks are dealing with. We are talking about farms, households and machinery necessary to carry out business, where the debt was sold on for 17% of the value. There were often many payments made on the machinery, some of which was old. I referred to a man in Wexford who had been beaten up by thugs - his tractor was ten years old and worth about €12,000. Deputy Fitzmaurice and I put forward this amendment to see if we could get some respect and put some manners on these people so that, where they sold a distressed loan to a vulture fund, they would first have had to have offered the same conditions to the person to whom the loan was made - whether it was for a house, tractor, shop, or the farm. That is not unreasonable. What are we doing? We are terrorising our own people and crushing them into ground to give away loans to foreign - and now home-grown - vulture companies.

This was also a way of bringing in revenue. It beggars belief that loans can be sold off for that kind of money. We know what we paid to Europe for the money. They told us it was a bailout but it was a clean out. Here was an opportunity to stop this in its tracks and bring valuable revenue into State coffers, to allow a modicum of civilised living in rural and urban Ireland for families who will end up in hospitals, whether they are general or psychiatric. A wasteland is being created, and for what purpose? It is to line the pockets of fat cats and vultures. I cannot understand it and I will not understand it, nor will any reasonable observer. No one will accept it. I do not like using the word but it is the rape of our own people and land for which we fought dearly. My late father fought in the War of Independence as did many others to free our country, and for what purpose? To be owned by these cartels and cabals and vulture funds. That is what is happening and I am appalled that the Minister would not listen to our suggestion in the Rural Independent Group's pre-budget submission to introduce a land tax on farms of over 750 acres because that covers the vast majority of ordinary farmers. People with holdings above that are not interested in their neighbours, parish or community, the just want to amass large tracts. It happened recently in Wicklow where another stud bought a farm of land.

The stud industry is great. I have nothing against it. All we wanted was a level playing field or some semblance of one, but the Government failed to do that in the budget.