Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)

The essential and big question everybody in the country is asking is, "Where is the bailout for the people?" There is a bailout for the bankers to the tune of over €100 billion but ordinary people who sought to do nothing more than put a roof over their heads – an entirely legitimate aspiration – are threatened with losing their homes and battered with unsustainable interest payments on inflated mortgages. The mortgages were inflated because of the reckless lending of the bankers and the reckless greed driven policies of Fianna Fáil, the EU authorities which did nothing to address what the bankers were doing, the developers, etc.

As with every problem we are facing, it is not those who are guilty and caused the crisis who are being asked to pay but those who are innocent, had nothing to do with causing it, cannot afford to pay and struggling to make ends meet. There is no bailout for them, nor is there a State guarantee or guaranteed protection, yet there are guarantees, bailouts and State protections to the nth degree for the bankers and institutions which caused the crisis. They stoked and pumped up the unsustainable bubble for no reason other than greed. If one is greedy, one's greed is insatiable and one is willing to do the most reckless things, one will be bailed out and protected. If, however, one is somebody who just wants to put a roof over one's head, tough luck. All the State will do is ask the institutions which caused the crisis to offer some forbearance and, at best, a little breathing space. However, as Deputy John Halligan stated, the banks actually keep threatening people and putting the pressure on them.

I am sorry the Minister is not present. The essence of this issue is summed up in the Orwellian doublethink of the Minister's speech thereon: "A key objective for the Government is to strengthen overall fiscal sustainability [of the State] by separating bank risk from sovereign risk." We are doing the exact opposite. The Government is welding the private gambling debts of the banks onto the backs of citizens of the State. It is what the last Government did and the Government is stating it will continue to do. As a consequence, people will lose their homes and are being screwed to the walls with debts they cannot afford to pay through no fault of their own. The Government will not issue the same guarantee it is giving to the banks to ordinary people who are fighting to keep a roof over their heads and make ends meet. In the process, the Government is crippling the economy because even those who can just about meet their mortgage repayments have no spending power left to fuel economic growth and meet the required domestic demand.

What is the alternative? The Government states there is none. The first alternative is to determine the principles that will guide our actions. The principle that must guide our actions is that the people, the innocent, should come first. Their right to a home should come before the right of the banks to be recapitalised, make profit and protect themselves, given that it is the banks which caused the problem. Let us not forget that those who are being threatened with having their homes taken from them and cannot meet interest repayments are the very people who have bailed out the banks. This is because of levies and pay cuts. The least we can ask for, given all the money that has been put into the banks and that the people now constitute the majority shareholder in the banks, is that the banks do not take people's homes from them and write down debts to levels that reflect the real values of properties during the bubble that was stoked up by the bankers and developers. In this way, debts could become sustainable and people could pay back their loans. Ultimately, it would save money for the State.

It is a loss-making exercise for banks to have to foreclose on loans and sell off homes at rock bottom prices, as they are doing. It is madness. Will the Government, please, do something about this and bring to an end the circumstances where it only bails out banks rather than ordinary people?

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