Willie O'Dea (Limerick City, Fianna Fail)

With the permission of the House I wish to share time with Deputies Timmy Dooley, Brendan Smith and Michael Healy-Rae. I congratulate my colleague, Deputy Michael McGrath, on his initiative in bringing forward this urgent and necessary legislation and on the energy, time and effort he has undoubtedly put into it. In so far as I can I will approach the matter in an non-partisan way but I am bound to comment at the outset on the last sentence of Deputy Ciarán Lynch, who stated that the Bill was not sufficiently robust. This triggered something in my memory. That was precisely what those in the Government said about my Industrial Relations (Amendment) Bill before they put it into cold storage. I am concerned that this Bill will follow the same fate. The Government decided that since it could not argue logically against the Industrial Relations (Amendment) Bill, it would not oppose it. Not opposing it did not mean the Government would advance it and I am concerned that this Bill will face the same fate. Whatever about the Industrial Relations (Amendment) Bill, this Bill is crucial and compellingly urgent. There are perhaps hundreds of thousands of ordinary men, women and families suffering. I thank God that I have never been in the situation where I could not pay my mortgage and no words of mine could do justice to the suffering and angst those who cannot pay must be going through.

Immediately after the election several of my constituents in difficulties with their mortgages approached me, some of whom were in considerable difficulty. Many admitted to me that they voted for the Government parties because they had specific proposals. Both election manifestos devoted a considerable amount of time and space to this matter and these people had voted for the Government parties on this basis. Perhaps because it is difficult to find Government Deputies in Limerick since the election, they approached me to ascertain what exactly was happening.

Month after month I raised the matter with the Taoiseach on the Order of Business. I made no political capital out of the Taoiseach's replies. When I asked him when he was going to do something for people in mortgage arrears, his replies ranged from "next session", "next month", "perhaps later this session", "this year", "next year", "I do not know" and "I will write to you". Eventually, the Minister for Finance was sitting beside him one day and he volunteered that he had the material and he would write to me. I must confess in fairness that he did so. Unfortunately, he wrote to me seven weeks after I raised the matter in the Dáil, indicative of the urgency with which the Government has approached the problem.

Let us consider the history. When the Government assumed office in March 2011, one in nine people in the country were in serious trouble with their mortgage, in other words they were more than 90 days in arrears. Now the number is down to one in eight people and all the anecdotal evidence is that the problem is growing rapidly. Both Government parties devoted a section of their election manifestos to the problem. Obviously, they thought deeply about the problem. They regarded it as urgent and as a top priority. As evidence of this the programme for Government, which runs to approximately 28 pages, contained one and a half pages of specific proposals on mortgage arrears. To the best of my knowledge not one of these has been honoured. In fact, they are being abandoned one after another as the pressure increases in the public domain. The Government took no notice of the Opposition but as people such as David McWilliams and other high profile economists began to write about the problem, the Government, in an effort to kick the can further down the road, decided on the time-honoured device of setting up a committee to advise them on how to do what it had specifically promised to do six months previously. This was a 22 man committee, rather a large committee to produce such an innocuous report. Most of the committee consisted of civil servants and bankers. I have no wish to guess how many of them are experiencing negative equity or difficulty paying their mortgages but I suspect few are.

I was able to reassure my constituents by informing them that the Government had set up a committee and would come up with specific proposals. I pointed out that the committee had two months to report and something would happen in two months and urged them to cling on, not buy this or that necessity and to keeping paying the mortgage or try to meet the arrears for two months and something would happen then.

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