Mr. Paul Joyce:

That is a large enough agenda. Starting with the final issue, that relating to awareness, there is a lot of information available. FLAC has a leaflet on tenants' rights, for example. Threshold, which we would view as the primary agency providing information on landlord and tenant law, has a lot of information and services available. Part of the problem we have seen over the years is that people in difficult situations - over-indebtedness, rent arrears and so on - are not necessarily feeling normally about their lives. That is a very bad way of putting it. We have carried out research that involved interviewing indebted people after they had gotten out of their problems and to the other side. They said they just temporarily did not really understand what was going on, found things very confusing, were very stressed and so on. It is very important to accept that over-indebtedness and being in financial difficulty are very disabling for people.

On the scheme that is about to be rolled out by the Legal Aid Board, MABS, the Department of Justice and Equality and the Department of Social Protection - a number of agencies are involved - the critical thing is to publicise it properly through the proper media. Leadership has to be taken. The State has to promote this, take ownership of it and explain why it is being introduced. It must articulate what the problem is and why we are trying to resolve it this way.

On the legal aid side, the Legal Aid Board has law centres all over the country. While it does an excellent job, it operates primarily in the family law area, where there is still huge demand. It is understandable that it would prioritise family law. However, the Civil Legal Aid Act 1995 only excludes certain areas of law. Debt is not one of them.

Rights or interests over land are excluded areas under the civil legal aid legislation. This is something that needs to be amended. The board is doing the best it can with the resources that it has; it does not have the resources to cover a wide number of areas of law. Again, this is something for which FLAC would have campaigned for a long time.

On the mortgage write-down issue, under sections 102 and 103 and various subsections of the Personal Insolvency Act, there is a suggestion that a personal insolvency arrangement, PIA, application being made by an insolvency practitioner might propose the write-down of an existing secured debt to something approaching its current market value. For example, a person may owe €300,000 but the house is worth 200,000 and the PIA proposal would incorporate that write-down. There is even a right within that section, if the PIA is accepted, for the creditor to claw back the difference if the property is sold for a greater amount in the future. I contacted the Insolvency Service of Ireland this week, which told me it does not have a category for PIAs with the write-down feature because they do not appear to be happening.

Deputy Coppinger is quite correct about split mortgages being promoted as a kind of implicit write-down. However, a split mortgage involves servicing one part of the loan and warehousing another. The warehoused part will become due for payment some day and nobody is exactly sure how it will be treated at that point. It has been suggested by some credit institutions that there will be a right for borrowers to remain in the property for the rest of their lifetime, but there is still a capital balance to be paid. Any of the split mortgage arrangements I have seen do not propose to write that down. There is evidence of split mortgages already. The number of split mortgages is well beyond 25,000 and over 20,000 have been agreed in the past three years. Some 5% of them are already failing. A quarter of the capitalisation of arrears restructures are now back in arrears. We think there is evidence that what looks like a restructure is likely to cause difficulties down the road.

We do not have particular expertise in cases where landlords want to sell. I understand that, under the residential tenancies legislation, if a landlord proposes to evict someone with a tenancy of between four and six years, he or she may evict on the basis that the property is to be sold within three months. The property would have to be sold within three months. However, I see no reason why a temporary amendment could not be introduced to put in place a moratorium on the amount of notice that might be required in a particular housing emergency.

That brings us back to the first question on constitutional issues. The committee has heard from a number of speakers about what is constitutional and what is unconstitutional. The Dáil will today debate a Bill that proposes to impose some kind of imperative on lenders not to increase variable rate mortgages and so on. Is that unconstitutional? I understand Mr. Edmund Honohan, when he came before the committee, summed things up fairly well when he said it is a question of competing interests. All personal rights in the Constitution, as I understand it, are subject to regulation in the public interest. There is only one way of finding out if something is unconstitutional and that is in the High Court or the Supreme Court.

We have had a personal debt crisis since 2008 but not many daring pieces of legislation. If something is unconstitutional or potentially unconstitutional, it can be referred to the Supreme Court before it is enacted and the Supreme Court can adjudicate upon it. A Bill has to be created in the first place, which has not happened in a number of instances. Whether it is compulsory purchase orders, compulsory write-downs or imposing a moratorium on how houses can be repossessed and tenants evicted, it is the same constitutional question.