Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour) | Oireachtas source

With regard to Priory Hall, the Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government, Deputy Phil Hogan, has initiated a process and within a short period of time it will work up solutions with stakeholders. The process started this morning and the Minister expects to have a report shortly. The Priory Hall issue is being dealt with quite quickly by the Government and I hope for a solution to the problem within a short period.

The Government has made the mortgage crisis a priority. That is why we changed the law to introduce personal insolvency legislation and why we have introduced, for the first time, non-judicial debt settlement arrangements and put in place the personal insolvency service, which has just begun its work. There is progress being made in that regard. The Personal Insolvency Act was signed into law at the end of last year and the personal insolvency service was formally launched on 1 March. The Central Bank has set targets requiring the main mortgage lenders to offer durable solutions to mortgage holders over 90 days in arrears. The revised code of conduct on mortgage arrears was published by the Central Bank in June and the Department of Finance continues to engage with lenders. The Central Bank's end of June mortgage data indicated the stock of personal mortgage restructures was around 79,000. Some 53% of these restructured accounts are not in arrears, which indicates that the banks are taking some early measures to address mortgage difficulties. It is welcome that the Central Bank stated over 76% of the restructured mortgage holders were deemed to be meeting the terms of their agreement. As indicated previously, the Department of Finance has more recent data from the main banks which indicates that at the end of July some 1,800 split mortgages were in place, 12,600 accounts had been subject to a term extension restructure and that a further 12,000 accounts had had arrears capitalised. Progress is being made on the issue of mortgage restructuring. The whole purpose of the legislation and the means put in place are such that every family in mortgage difficulty will have access to the process and system. The Government will closely monitor what is happening in practice because the outcome we want to achieve is to ensure that, one by one, households in mortgage difficulty and arrears will have their mortgage problem solved using the processes put in place to enable people to put the mortgage crisis behind them and get on with the rest of their lives.

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