Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

The constitutional issue seems to be the major difference between the committee and the Central Bank. Do the witnesses accept that there are competing rights in the Constitution? Do they accept that it is now widely held internationally that shelter is a fundamental human right? That right is recognised in the international convention on economic and social rights. It has also been recognised constitutionally in a series of court cases down the decades, for instance, that the vested private property rights do not always trump public rights, human rights or the social rights of the Irish people. It may be decided that a road or something like that is a public necessity and, therefore, a compulsory purchase of land may be in order to give effect to the road. The witnesses have told us about focusing on the transactional nature of the sale to the funds. What they are not telling us is what thoughts or examination they have given to the people whose mortgages are being sold on? Do the witnesses agree that economic precariousness is one of the great difficulties of this era? Jobs have become more precarious, people's access to housing, reasonable rent, affordable mortgages and so on has not become much more difficult in Ireland and globally, possibly, partly as a result of securitisation of a lot of financial assets.

It has become one of the fundamental threats to working democracy that one does not have a situation where there is an appropriate balance between the single individual, family, couple or person who entered into a mortgage and the financial institution with which they entered into it. That is why the committee has frequently focused on some protection of customer rights. Have the witnesses any sense of what they could offer to customers, who possibly were loaned too much money back in the day by banks that were very careless and subsequently went bust? Very often that situation was not the fault of the people who took the mortgages because stuff came in their letterboxes telling them how much they could borrow and so on. There is a context and history to how so many people got into difficulty. Do the witnesses have something additional to offer somebody who already feels precarious because they have been in mortgage difficulty and possibly lost their job? We know from all of the different hearings that the witnesses and ourselves have attended that people struggle to re-establish themselves financially. A lot of the people who are paying are doing that. Is there something that the witnesses can offer people who are concerned about the vested private property rights? They might also show an equal concern for the precarious situation that mortgage holders are finding themselves in. Instead of improving, unfortunately, the situation seems to be getting worse rather than better.