Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

We had a Government that drove up property prices through tax breaks. As Deputy Joan Collins and others have said, many people are in very expensive houses and what they owe is not reflected in the current value of the house. As a country we need to create resolutions for those people so that they can live with a sustainable payment. In recent years we have paid more than €300 million to the banks in mortgage interest supplement. We are paying large amounts annually for people's interest without the banks giving anything like a discount or a resolution to help the structure of their debt to be reorganised so we can keep them in their houses. We are phasing this out over four years because some people have been on it for seven or eight years. The other downside of the mortgage interest supplement is that as with the rent supplement people can get caught in an employment trap. For people who are hopelessly indebted, we are developing new resolution processes such as the mortgage to rent scheme.

See this speech in context