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

The take-up of the personal insolvency arrangements has been pathetic when measured against the expectations this Government had to deal with the mortgage crisis. The former Minister for Justice and Equality, Deputy Shatter, said that approximately 15,000 applications for debt settlement arrangements and personal insolvency arrangements would be applied for each year plus a further 3,000 to 4,000 applications for debt relief notices. As the Minister mentioned, there are 850 in the system and at the end of quarter three of this year there were only 1,200 applications in total since the very start. It is not working.

If other banks took the same approach as Bank of Ireland to veto every proposal that requires a debt write-down of secured mortgage debt it would be dead in the water. Some banks are engaging with the spirit of it but no personal insolvency practitioner, PIP, should put forward a proposal to write down debt with the Bank of Ireland because the bank will veto it.

The Minister mentioned the need for tweaking but is this core area of the legislation up for tweaking or will he allow the Bank of Ireland and other banks deal with it at their leisure?

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