Gerry Horkan (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I never suggested that for one minute. I am not sure why Mr. Tobin is responding to me in that way because that was not the point I made. The point I made was that lots of people out there are potentially going to be affected by the transfer of loans to an entity that may not have the same longer-term interest as the entity from which the loan originated. By and large, the bulk of the €39 billion, which is a staggering figure, was primarily borrowed from the pillar banks at the time. I accept that some of them are no longer operating on this island but back then fintech entities were not doing what they are doing now.

Of course, we can all look back at that time and ask what the banks were doing in throwing money at people with very few guarantees in many cases. They inflated the price of property enormously. I was a local councillor at the time and the price of property in south Dublin increased enormously because the banks were lending too much money. If one could get €500,000, one borrowed it and that meant that house prices rose to €800,000 and so on. These are figures that people in other parts of the country would find staggering but they were quite low at the time in parts of the area I represented. The banks lent out money which inflated the prices and ultimately, the whole thing came crashing down. People were left with enormous debts and the value of their properties collapsed. We know all of that but the point I was trying to make is that people will be turning up at the doors of public representatives, be they councillors, Deputies or Senators, whose homes are repossessed and we will have to find them a house. The State will either build them a house or accommodate them by way of the HAP or RAS schemes. The Government should be taking that into account and not allowing some loans to be transferred to vulture funds when those funds are possibly only getting involved to earn a quick buck. There should be some other vehicle that takes the non-performing loans off the books of the banks and deals with them. We may need a NAMA-type operation but I get the impression that such a vehicle does not exist.