Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party)

Deputy Ciarán Lynch referred to the fact that this is a home-purchasing nation. That is true. Some commentators in the past have responded to that as if it was something dramatically unusual that should be changed and that working people should put their lives and their need for shelter at the gentle mercies of landlords, which is another class about which we in this country know a lot from our historic memory. As one who spent 20 years of my life in the hands of landlords, I commend the wisdom of working people who purchased their own homes. This wisdom was manifested during the craziness of the property bubble when rents charged for quite modest homes in working class areas were equal to the gouging level of mortgages being charged.

Deputy Mathews gave us a parable of a good and faithful public servant, prudent, diligent and paying his or her way, who then finished up, as a result of the machinations of the financial markets, hundreds of thousands of euro in negative equity and in an impossible situation. The Deputy then accused Opposition Deputies of having no solution. There is a solution, but there is no solution on the basis of the system he supports, which is the financial market system by which unelected, unaccountable, faceless forces in hedge funds and vampire banks etc. have such enormous control over society and the lives of human beings. We have seen clearly that kind of capitalism is an anarchic system. It is a casino-like system in which there are no solutions.

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