Pearse Doherty (Donegal South West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the fact that 46% have been offered deals but the devil is in the detail and when one goes into the detail, one finds from individual banks that thousands of those offers have been letters of repossession. None of us are going to dispute that. That is the reality. They tell us straight up that the penalty for not reaching the target is so severe that they will reach it and the easiest way they can do this is repossession. The problem is that this does not resolve the problem for genuine people who want to pay their mortgages and stay in the family homes and who want an offer of long-term restructuring.

I welcome the Minister's comments about his disappointment but it needs to go further. He needs to send out a clear message to the institutions under this process that there will be no more hokery-pokery with the figures and that repossessions on the scale on which they have been done to meet the targets are no longer acceptable. We also need to see long-term restructuring that goes further than arrears recapitalisation, which is the bulk of what is happening, and interest deferral. We must look at a greater range of issues around split mortgages in terms of debt write-down, debt for equity swap which is not happening, the Ulster Bank model and the economic concession model which seems very favourable as well. We need to see more of these measure and less of the legal letters to meet the targets.

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