Arthur Spring (Kerry North-West Limerick, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I acknowledge that we are part of a generation I consider to be jinxed. This pressure was put upon us not through our own doing but by poor political leadership and poor regulation. It is not just Fianna Fáil and the previous Government that are responsible for this. Other factors must be addressed as well. However, I find this goes beyond what is normally accepted as throwing the pie back in the direction it came from. According to Stephen Kinsella's five-year review of the financial collapse, August 2007 was the month in which the growth of the world economy began to falter and fail exposing the weakness of Ireland's banks, bursting the construction bubble, hammering the State's finances, escalating unemployment and bad debt levels and undoing a generation's worth of economic growth and development in a country that was just starting to leave the bad days of the 1980s behind. He then refers to the role of the Fianna Fáil-led Government which was ably assisted by the Green Party and, prior to that, the Progressive Democrats and many cheerleading Independents, some of whom are still in the House. The Government changed the composition of its taxation revenue, reducing income taxes and relying more heavily on property-based taxes exposing the State's coffers to a significant downside risk when the property market went down. The banking regulator was off somewhere playing golf. The media, which was making money from property supplements, stayed silent and was not knowledgeable. The same was true of most economists who were not being paid by the banks to cheerlead the boom.

There is an over-supply of shocking statistics to emphasise how unstable this situation was. I will give two examples. At the end of 2008, the total stock of foreign borrowing by Irish banks was around €110 billion. In 2004, Ireland's banks had only borrowed more than €15 billion from abroad. At that time, we were probably heading towards the abyss of the bubble but, at the same time, we had a diligent and prudent economy without reckless lending. At the end of 2007, Irish banks were lending 40% more to property developers alone than they had to the entire Irish population a mere seven years earlier.

This must be tackled. The Government, in particular the Cabinet, would be from a different generation compared to those of us who will speak so passionately about this tonight. The single biggest act in which we will engage during our tenure will be getting this generation out of negative equity. I agree with a great deal of what Fianna Fáil says here. Unfortunately, I do not agree with the fourth point in the motion where it says that the local property tax and other measures in Budget 2013 are not appropriate because it put it here. It said it had to be put in place. Let us not kid anybody. One can kid people a few times but this is far too serious a matter for someone to say that somebody else is responsible for it. Between 160,000 and 200,000 families will be taken out of negative equity and an overburdened position where they are paying off more than a fair share of their disposable or net income.

We now have four vehicles that will allow the State to deal with this. If we do it in a prudent manner, in two years' time, nobody should be pressurised into a position of financial distress because they bought a family home. I welcome this significant development. I have two major passions while I am in this Government for as long as it lasts - the creation of jobs and, more importantly, sustainable mortgages. This Government and I will do everything we can to ensure that what the previous Government did will be undone and that we are put into a better position. I thank Fianna Fáil for raising this motion.

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