Michael Noonan (Limerick City, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I have been urged by all sides of the House to come up with solutions to the problem of personal debt. We have spent a lot of time on it and we are now at the point where the system is beginning to work properly. The primary legislation is the insolvency Act. It is just ready to come online but there are circumstances where problems could be resolved better informally. The Central Bank is about putting in place a pilot scheme to determine whether it can resolve informally the debt circumstances of individuals who have borrowed from the banks and other lending institutions, but who also have unsecured borrowings from the credit union movement. It is in the interest of the credit union movement to get back as much as it can of what it has lent. The pilot scheme is intended to work out a fair system in which different lenders will get a proportion of what they have lent returned to them and in which the borrower will be put in a position in which his or her personal debt is sustainable. That is all that is occurring. It is another method of resolving the problem that everyone in the House is aware of.

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