Barry Cowen (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Ceann Comhairle's office for allowing me to raise this issue. The criticism of the mortgage to rent scheme earlier this week by a High Court judge, Miss Justice Elizabeth Dunne, has prompted me to raise this issue today. Miss Justice Dunne said the scheme was giving false hope and should not be raised in court as an option for borrowers in arrears.

It is seen by many as an indication of the failure to confront adequately the ongoing mortgage arrears crisis. The judge also said that she had read or heard that only one party had availed of the scheme.

The scheme is obviously a very limited measure to address a much larger problem that the Government has consistently failed to get to grips with. Some 218,000 out of 911,000 mortgages are now not being paid on their original terms. Some 11% of those with mortgages are three months in arrears, 5% are six months or more in arrears and approximately 10% are under three months in arrears. The Central Bank issued the figure for those under three months in arrears for the first time in August. It is a social and economic crisis that has been allowed to continue to spiral out of control. The Government received the Keane report more than a year ago and we are still awaiting meaningful action on its recommendations. The recent figures I stated bear out the failure to implement proposals such as split mortgages, shared ownership and now the difficulties and fiasco that arise under this scheme.

The Personal Insolvency Bill lacks the inclusion of an independent arbitrator to ensure that banks co-operate and in the absence of that we feel it will not effectively tackle this crisis. The bottom line is that the Government appears to be failing to provide the leadership required to alleviate the enormous pressure thousands of families face.

This week's criticism of the mortgage-to-rent scheme points to that failure in rising to the challenge of mortgage arrears. In light of that criticism, I wish to ask some questions on the scheme. How many have availed of the mortgage-to-rent scheme? Has it reached the target the Minister of State set when launching it of 100 households benefiting from the scheme initially? Does she still believe that in future years it will be availed of by several thousand households as she originally stated or does she agree with the judge that it should not be brought up as a viable solution to mortgage arrears? If so, how can the criteria be changed in response to this criticism in order to allow it to be an effective tool in the Government's attempts to tackle this crisis?

See this speech in context