Arthur Morgan (Louth, Sinn Fein)

I move amendment No. 10:

In page 17, between lines 17 and 18, to insert the following:

"(c) all participating institutions shall be obliged to increase lending to SMEs and first time buyers and shall be obliged to report on lending activity in these areas bi-monthly to the Houses of the Oireachtas,

(d) all participating institutions shall be obliged to cease mortgage repossession for the period of two years, in cases of genuine hardship, following commencement of this Act.".

I thank the Leas-Cheann Comhairle for his co-operation as we gingerly sought to find a way to get through these amendments more quickly. The first thing I would like to say as part of this discussion is that I do not trust the banks to lend. They lent too much during the boom and they are lending too little during the recession. That has been an international fact of life for some considerable time. It will take more than moral suasion to ensure the banks lend more money - legal prescription will be needed.

In recent times, there has not been a comfortable relationship between bankers and morality. Therefore, it is important that we put legislation in place. I appreciate that a number of the Minister's amendments propose the introduction of regulations. I will be interested to hear what he has to say in that regard. The scale of what we are dealing with is very substantial. Earlier on Report Stage, somebody asked how the billions of euro we are talking about can be quantified. When I asked a friend of mine, Mr. Séamus Hazlett, who is not an election candidate, to try to work out a quantifiable system of measuring this, he came to me a few days later to say that it takes almost 12 days for a million seconds to pass and almost 32 years for a billion seconds to pass. That is a demonstration of the substantial scale of what we are dealing with. I look forward to hearing what the Minister will say in a few moments.

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