Luke Flanagan (Roscommon-South Leitrim, Independent) | Oireachtas source

It is stretching it to call him a person.

We did not ask any of those questions of multi-billionaire media moguls when we were writing down their debt, but I am dealing with people who tell me they are on the verge of suicide because their debts will not be written down. I spoke to a man last week who told me he had three bottles of wine in his house left over from a couple of years ago. He had not touched drink in a while. He put them on the table in front of him because he did not know where to go. He got all of his tablets and put them on the table in front of him. He was going to kill himself because he could not pay off his banking debt. The dog put his paw on his knee and the man decided not to do it. A good job he did not do it but he never would have thought about killing himself in the first place if he was treated the same way as multi-billionaire media moguls being protected by the Government.

We would imagine foster carers would be all right, that the banks would not see them as fair game. They certainly did not see them as fair game when they handed out the loans, they did not allow for foster care payments when deciding what loans they would offer. Now, a family has come to me in distress with a mortgage the bank should never have approved in the first place because it was unsustainable and they have been told they will have to hand over their foster care payments. That child, who is from a difficult background, will now have to live in a house where the new parents will struggle to put food on the table and the child will be denied the shared cultural experience of watching sport on television and will not have the same standard of living as anyone else because they are fair game for the banks, but the multi-billionaire media moguls are not.

Those people in this republic are worrying about whether they will be able to keep being able to foster in the long term. As I am sure the Minister of State is aware, it is difficult enough to get someone involved in foster care without attacking the cohort of those people who have serious banking debt, thereby lessening numbers even further.

I did not expect this Government to be perfect. We knew what we were getting in the tin with Fine Gael on the label. We knew it would be a right-wing Government, but when people voted for the Labour Party, they voted for some form of socialism. They did not vote for welfare for the rich and punitive terror for the poor and most vulnerable and society. I will vote against this Bill and I will certainly not facilitate the Government in evicting people from their houses. May the Government feel their wrath if it does this.

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