Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Something that is not in the report but which has had a significant impact on society came to the fore when the pandemic hit. I refer to the abolition in 2014 of the mortgage interest supplement. At present, if one is renting, one can get the rent supplement which basically pays one's rent if one loses one's income. However, lots of people are paying mortgages. Right up to 2014, for up to two years after losing one's employment the interest on the mortgage was paid. That was a considerable safety net. What we hope is that if this pandemic ends, most people will go back to work. This will have been short lived. If one goes into a bank to tell it that one can pay all the interest and only needs a capital freeze, the bank normally will give one that. Anyway, one could make it a condition of getting a mortgage supplement that the bank would provide a freeze on the capital. This has brought forward the absolute requirement and this committee should recommend that the mortgage supplement be reintroduced.

I do not believe all this. Because of the structures we created with the Central Bank being more interested in fiduciary issues than it is in the good of the citizens, at times it is more worried about keeping the banks solvent. I can understand that to a point, after 2010 and 2011. That is all very fine but the individual citizens, who had no hand, act or part in bringing in the pandemic, have to be kept solvent too. It seems we have tackling this at the wrong end, on our knees begging banks to give maithiúnas, breaks and all the rest, instead of doing the obvious thing. Let us be straight about it. If one had no other care in the world and did not have any overheads, the €350 was a real big lift. If one has a family and a mortgage, even if one is getting the child dependant allowance or whatever, those who cannot pay the mortgage and the interest on the mortgage are taking a mega-whammy. This is one way of separating the people with high legitimate overheads, as we do with the rent, from those who do not have those overheads because they are living at home and targeting the money where it is needed to keep people in their status quo. That is all we are trying to do in such a situation. Even in ordinary unemployment, 60% or more of people who become unemployed are re-employed within the year. In the vast majority of cases, if this was a short-term safety net and if people got back into employment, they would not have an overhang of debt from the unemployed period. I am sorry for going on at length about it. Even within my own party, I have tried to raise this issue repeatedly since 2014. I cannot understand how we let that safety net disappear.