Enda Kenny (Mayo, Fine Gael)

Today the Ulster Bank and Halifax and First Active have raised their variable standard interest rates for the first time since 2001. This development comes in the face of a further hike in interest rates by the European Central Bank when it meets on Thursday. This will make life very difficult for hundreds of thousands of people who currently feel the pinch of rising prices, fuel costs, threats of unemployment, cutbacks in frontline services and a deterioration in the value of their pensions and houses. In particular, 100,000 young people face the terrifying spectacle of their houses being lower in value than their mortgages.

I remind the Taoiseach that he bears responsibility for a great deal of the problem, despite the fact that he and his Government will continually argue that it is due to international events. I will quote his address to the National Mortgage Conference in January 2006 when, as Minister for Finance, he stated "there is certainly a consensus that the Irish mortgage and housing market has been strong over an extended period of years because the economic fundamentals of the Irish economy have been strong". In April 2006, speaking to the Real Estate Alliance property conference, he assured the public, particularly young people considering whether they should use their savings to buy a home, that economic fundamentals were "anchoring the performance of the property market". We now know there was no such consensus because in October 2005 the International Monetary Fund, backed up by the OECD, the ESRI and the Central Bank, stated the house price over-valuation in Ireland was large compared to other countries and could not be solely explained by economic fundamentals. During his term as Minister for Finance, the Taoiseach knew and was being advised by the best experts at home and abroad that house prices were grossly over-inflated. Does he accept any responsibility for this debacle and the position in which 100,000 young people, including many young couples, find themselves?

Will the Taoiseach explain what the Minister for Social and Family Affairs meant yesterday when she said the Government was there to help people who lost their jobs or got into difficulty repaying their mortgages? Was this an announcement of some new Government scheme for mortgage repayments?

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