Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I understand this legislation arises out of the restructuring plan agreed between Bank of Ireland and the European Commission. Under the plan, Bank of Ireland is required to offer certain assets of its ICS Building Society for sale. ICS must first transfer those assets to Bank of Ireland, which will then sell them. This Bill will permit the transfer to take place lawfully.

We are told it is a technical Bill. In fact, however, there is a much bigger issue at play here that others have alluded to, namely, the philosophy of the European Union, the Commission and the European Central Bank. Jürgen Habermas put it well last year when he said:

The actual course of the crisis management [The crisis may not be at its peak, but it is still there] is pushed and implemented in the first place by the large camp of pragmatic politicians who pursue an incrementalist agenda but lack a comprehensive perspective. They are oriented towards “More Europe” because they want to avoid the far more dramatic and presumably costly alternative of abandoning the euro.

That would be really problematic, but there is validity in what he says.

What bothers me about this is that the Commission is acting for the markets. In the recent reorganisation of the European Union there was a possibility that we would not have a voice. Where is our voice? What is it saying on behalf of the citizens of this country? We are seeing the impact of the liquidation of the IBRC on those who had mortgages from Irish Nationwide. They had no control over what happened to their mortgages. They were sold off in four different funds. Outside investors were most interested in those that were in trouble. They did not want the performing mortgages because it would cost them money to administer those mortgages. They wanted the ones they could get at a huge discount and that they could sell off.

The Minister for Finance, Deputy Noonan, said this morning that nobody is speaking for the taxpayer and that he is trying to make sure the taxpayer is protected. I do not see how the taxpayer is protected when people’s homes are repossessed and the taxpayer must, rightly, step in to make sure people have shelter, whether through rent assistance, local authority houses or other types of support. The taxpayer must pay a price that could, in some cases, have been avoided by doing some things differently, but we were told yesterday that was not even written into the terms of reference.

What worries me is that we are repeating the mistakes made in the winding down of the IBRC and its impact on those mortgage holders. We have no guarantee that €1 billion worth of Irish mortgages will not be sold to an unregulated institution. It is important that the Minister of State tell us how many mortgages are involved when he wraps up this debate. Deputy Boyd Barrett made a good point about the ICS mortgage holders knowing about it, because the Irish Nationwide mortgage holders did not know anything until they got the letter in August or September of last year.

Then they realised the impact it would have on them and how their mortgages were packaged and sold. The Commission has indicated that it would prefer not to endorse a sale to an unregulated institution, but there is no legal protection in this regard. Given that the Commission is to the forefront in generating the legislation and directives with which we comply, why does it not do something about the matter? Surely it has a role to play when it considers any potential sale, as provided for in the Bill, in terms of prohibiting assets from being sold to unregulated institutions. Can we safely assume Bank of Ireland will take the opportunity to offload some of the more troublesome mortgages in the ICS loan book? In doing this, it is extremely likely that the purchaser will not be found in Ireland. When I raised this issue in the context of the Irish Nationwide Building Society loan book, the Minister of State at the Department of Finance, Deputy Brian Hayes, advised me that I should not prejudge who was going to buy the mortgages because it was possible that the purchaser would be an Irish institution. That did not turn out to be the case.

It would be wrong to argue that others should not profit from our debts if we do not acknowledge that it is equally wrong for others to profit from Greece's debts. I support that side of the legislation, but I have serious concerns about the domestic side. I wonder whether these two matters have been grouped together in the Bill as a means of getting people to agree to it.

I do not understand how the Commission can agree matters with Bank of Ireland without setting out conditions. The issue of the excessive salaries paid to people at the top of that bank was raised this morning. It appears that it is all one way traffic when it comes to protections. The banks and those at the upper echelons are protected, but citizens are much further down the pecking order. When one considers the bailout of Bank of Ireland and the significant debt discounts it received when its loans transferred to NAMA, our interest goes way beyond the Minister's 14% shareholding. As we approach the European elections, we must ask ourselves what kind of Europe we want. The European Commission is heavily involved in this arrangement. It will not be possible to create a Europe with a social conscience or that works for its citizens if the Commission acts first and foremost on behalf of the money markets. It is understandable people become Eurosceptics when they see how measures can be arranged to the detriment of individuals who are not even considered in the terms of reference, as was the case in respect of Irish Nationwide Building Society mortgage holders.

There is an absence of a big vision to solve this crisis, in the way that there was a vision in the aftermath of the Second World War. The London debt agreement of 1953 was one of the greatest acts of solidarity among nations, including Britain and France. We put a few bob into the debt fund, as did Greece. The biggest beneficiary of the debt agreement was Germany, the debts of which were either written off or rescheduled over such a long period that the last repayments were only made in recent years. That type of vision should be articulated by the European institutions. It is not enough that we concentrate on the technical working out of issues. We need a vision for the Europe we desire and the European Commission must be at the centre of it. These limited technical agreements are only prolonging the process and adding to the agony for some individuals.

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