Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Whether vampires exist in reality, the characters we heard on the now infamous tapes are not fictional. All of us can appreciate the disgust, although not the shock, people felt at hearing the macho diatribes between these individuals. The disgust felt by the tens of thousands of families across the State who are in mortgage distress is all the deeper. To listen to Mr. David Drumm describe how he planned to go to the Central Bank with his arms swinging to demand "the moolah" for his bankrupt bank is revealing. We know there will be no option for struggling families to refuse to pay the moolah or to pluck the figures from their posteriors.

It is all the more shocking to be confronted with the details of a new code of conduct for mortgage arrears on the same morning that we hear these revelations. The Minister has indicated this is part of a supportive process, but I challenge her on that claim. It abolishes the previous limit of three contacts per month from banks to customers in arrears. In other words, it allows opportunities for the harassment of families already under pressure. It introduces a three month notice period before a bank can move to seek a repossession order, or eight months in the case of new arrears cases. Whatever about kicking the can down the road, this appears to be a case of acting with indecent haste. The code of conduct is best understood as part of a wider, co-ordinated attack on struggling homeowners. The Government has already passed legislation to make it easier to repossess family homes and tax the family home. At the behest of the troika, it has now introduced the new code of conduct which ignores much of the advice given by organisations that work with struggling homeowners.

I ask the Minister to explain to those families with whom she has sympathised this morning the difference in treatment between the macho men of the banking world and the struggling householder.

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