Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

I put it to the Taoiseach that the proposals the banks are insisting on with regard to mortgage arrears are to the benefit of the banks at all times and not of the thousands of owner-occupiers who are in difficulty. The Taoiseach said during Leaders' Questions that he would extend the remit of the Cabinet sub-committee on mortgage arrears into a more general approach to the banking sector. Last week, we got a lot of detailed insight from the senior executives of three of the main banks who appeared before the Joint Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform. AIB reported 34,000 mortgage accounts were subject to forbearance at June 2012. That is the strange language of banking; "forbearance" means mortgages in distress and people in distress trying to meet the payments or unable to meet them because their economic circumstances have changed. The so-called "solution" was that 66% of those owner-occupiers were put on interest only arrangements. That is highly unsatisfactory and merits the attention of the Cabinet sub-committee on mortgage arrears. What sort of perspective is it for an ordinary working person or pensioner who, to hold on to his or her home, a basic human right, is literally shackled to the bank, paying nothing but interest on mortgages that many people were forced to take out to get a roof over their heads or start a family because of the extortionate house prices at the time?

For these people it is an eternal ball and chain of debt.

We need much more radical solutions. The next committee meeting should consider not this painful one-to-one consultation process the banks advised us they engage in, but rather a general write-down of the false value of homes to the real value and a calibration of the monthly mortgage repayments accordingly. At a stroke, that would lift a massive burden of debt from an entire generation of people and free up billions of euro that could then go into the real economy for jobs and services because people could spend in shops and on services which would be a big help in regenerating the crucified domestic economy. Since the Government has followed line by line the Fianna Fáil-Green Party Government approach of bailing out the authors of this economic and banking crisis, at huge cost to the people, why will there not be a similar predisposition for the tens of thousands of our people who are in this dreadful situation? Why does the Government keep them in the shackles of these financial institutions which, along with the developers and European speculators, caused the problem in the first instance?

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