Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The cut to mortgage interest supplement means hundreds of thousands of people who have lost their jobs as a result of crisis caused by others will have the misery of losing their jobs compounded by the great likelihood of losing their homes. This is a case of making a bad situation worse and of rubbing salt into the wound. It is appalling.

There is an implicit acknowledgement in this measure that the Government does not believe any of its own talk about economic recovery and improvement in the employment situation here. If it believed there was any serious prospect of economic and employment recovery it would not feel the need to introduce this cut. It would see it as a stopgap for people who lose their jobs but have a realistic prospect of getting another one sometime soon. Obviously, Government does not believe that. It does not believe for one minute that its policies are capable of providing employment for those who have lost their jobs and who now face the prospect of losing their homes. The Government is implementing this cut because it does not believe its own propaganda and because it sees mortgage interest supplement as a potential drain on the public finances.

A better and fairer way of resolving this situation would have been to force the banks to write down unsustainable debt, which the Government has refused to do. Yet again the banks are protected and ordinary people suffer the loss of their jobs and, now, the likelihood of losing their homes. This cut, like so many of the other cuts proposed in the Bill, is shameful.

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