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

I will not bother then. I would say people can work it out. I would have thought they would have come to applaud Deputy Collins and to say that the approach worked for them. It worked to the extent that the head of one of the companies said the restructuring was a very positive development for the company and put it in a good place to deal with many challenges for the business. If we went along with what Deputy Collins suggests, average persons having benefited from it could say the restructuring was a very positive development for their house and put them in a good place to deal with many challenges for their families.

Let us look at the write-down for one of the companies. I will quote from NAMA Wine Lake because it says it a lot better than me. It states:

But on the face of it, it looks as if the banks may forgive or write-down or write-off up to €196m plus interest or 44c-plus in the euro and are getting 11% of a company which had a market value of €20m.

In other words, the bank did a deal with a company whereby it wrote off €196 million in debt and it got €2.2 million of a company in return. Let us, for example, apply those rules to a €200,000 mortgage on a house now worth €100,000, as would be the case in my town. If the banks decided, as they already have for those big organisations, to give a 44% write-down on such a mortgage, that would bring it down to €112,000. I did hear a Member suggest that perhaps this Bill would be better if the bank would take equity. Let us say we would stomach that, which would be hard to do given that the banks caused the problem in the first place. On the basis of the logic for the media companies, even though it would stick in my craw, it would be better than what some have suggested, because all the bank would get is 11% of one's house for an €80,000 write-down.

It sounds like a good idea but if it is such a good one, why did the employees not turn up to listen to why it could benefit ordinary people too?

I had people in my office approximately six or seven months after I was elected and I obtained figures for them on stress tests. I was told that in the region of €9 billion was available to help us with write-downs. Who has that money? Has it been used to write down the debts of multi-billionaires? How much of the money is left? Anyone who would suggest that Deputy Collins's Bill is unrealistic should examine the fact that there is meant to be approximately €9 billion available. Sadly, all people are not treated the same.

If an ordinary person wants to have his debt written down, the personal insolvency service will publish his name. It is a bit like “Cheers": the personal insolvency service where everybody knows your name. I asked the Minister for Finance, Deputy Noonan, the details on the sort of debt write-down the banks that we own gave the media organisation and was told the information was commercially sensitive. This is a wonderful country, is it not?

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