Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party)
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Ms O'Dea, you were supposed to be there to protect the consumer, the ordinary person. Between 1996 and 2006, the price of a home for an ordinary person increased by the equivalent of the average industrial wage each year for ten years. Now, the profiteering and the speculation that was responsible for that situation was driven by massive lending by the banks, including the banks taking wholesale funds from international institutions and laying them out, and then changing rules like mortgages increased from their parents 20 years to 35 or 40 years, etc., etc., so that young people who were desperate to start a home, you know, were forced to go under this system. Did your office and the Financial Regulator board fail miserably to protect young people caught in this bind or not?