Sandra McLellan (Cork East, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to contribute to the debate on this Bill. Housing is one of the core issues relating to an individual's well-being and his or her life situation. Even more importantly, it is a fundamental expression and building block of society. One could go further and say that housing has much to tell us about the values, identity and integrity of a given society. If we follow this logic and consider Ireland, and, by extension, Irish society, what we see is a society that is in free fall. This is a country which is in economic ruin and in which large numbers of people are struggling to pay their mortgages and keep a roof over their heads and who live in constant fear of eviction. Many of them are faced with making a decision with regard to whether it would be better to hand over the keys to their homes to the banks.

Living a life where every day is a struggle and where one's nights are full of worry and an all-encompassing dread of what the future may hold severely damages the human psyche and causes families to self-destruct. In the Ireland of today, thousands of people and families live like this. Unfortunately, what I have described is life in the real world, a world in which people live with the mistakes of the past on a daily basis. They do not have the luxury of talking nonsense about some great future we are all going to enjoy. Every day they struggle to find the money to pay for bread, potatoes or a pair of shoes for one of their children. They are living in the real world. This is a world of debts, arrears, loans and scrimping and scraping. It is a world devoid of hope, with no light at the end of the tunnel.

If one listened to Deputy Martin's presidential address to his party's Ard-Fheis on Saturday evening last, one would think he only joined Fianna Fáil in 2011. In February, the Governor of the Central Bank, Professor Patrick Honohan, said that household financial distress is at unprecedented levels and that this can be seen in the extraordinary rates of arrears relating to owner-occupier mortgages. The Central Bank's figures inform us that more than one in ten mortgage holders are now in arrears of three months or more and that some 27,000 - or almost 18% - of buy-to-let mortgages are in arrears. The Bill does nothing for the people affected in this regard other than increasing their fears and by enshrining in law the fact they can be evicted from their homes on the say so of some bank which probably engaged in highly unquestionable actions in the past. This is not right. It is also neither fair nor just and it makes no political sense.

Sinn Féin is opposed to the Bill because it does nothing to help people whose mortgages are in distress. Indeed, the opposite is the case. The Bill, like all the other policy initiatives of the Fine Gael-Labour Government, comes down on the side of the rich, the privileged and those with big money. It favours the banks and financial institutions over the ordinary people of Ireland. It also favours money and finance capital over the futures and lives of families, children, mothers and fathers and single people. The Land and Conveyancing Law Reform Bill 2013 does nothing to help those who are struggling and whose mortgages are in arrears. It may ingratiate Messrs. Kenny, Gilmore and Noonan to the troika but this is not what good politics or, for that matter, good governance are all about. In a republic, good governance puts the people first. It is the people, Mary and Joe Bloggs, who are centre stage, not bankers, international bureaucrats or financial capitalists. This Bill is contrary to the people's interests. Any legislation which does not put the people first and protect their interests will be opposed by Sinn Féin. Sinn Féin is on the side of the people and will continue to fight for their interests in this House.

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