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

I am asking about the role which the Cabinet sub-committee could play in regard to these crucial issues.

Questions to the Taoiseach will become meaningless if all we can do is ask how many times the committee met and when he says five times we say it should have met six times. It makes a nonsense of it and it is similar with regard to other matters.

Unless a general approach to the huge crisis of owner-occupiers in grave difficulties is implemented there will be no relief for the thousands who are in difficulties. As the Taoiseach knows, mortgages of 40 years were taken out. People could have been ten years into such mortgages when the crash happened. Are they now to have ten years of paying interest only and then go on the treadmill for another 30 or 40 years of repayments? This is an impossibility. This is why the committee must discuss radical measures. It may go against the ethos and workings of capitalism but we are speaking about our people. The banks and financial institutions should be at the behest of the interests of society and not the other way around.

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