Peter Mathews (Dublin South, Independent) | Oireachtas source

A year ago, on 19 December, the legislation was rushed through by guillotine by a Government with the largest majority ever in this State. It follows from what was equivalent to the physical destruction that occurred in Europe in the years 1939 to 1945. There was physical destruction that required a rebuilding of the countries where that destruction had taken place. In Ireland, there was financial destruction.

We hear the figure of €64 billion as being the amount of money that had to be injected and infused into the banking system. The destruction in the overall financial system of households and businesses was approximately €140 billion. Where do we get that figure from? The losses in the Irish banks, in commercial terms, requiring the visible capitalisation was approximately €65 billion. We have to add to that approximately €30 billion for mortgage loan losses and provisions that are still hurting families and businesses, which gives us €95 billion. They were the Irish-owned, domestic banks. There were also the foreign-owned domestic banks, which had losses of €45 billion. If we add those figures together, that is €140 billion.

That is the destruction that occurred on households and businesses as a result of completely reckless organisation of the financial system up to 2008. That is about 70% of the national income of this country. It is proportionately the biggest destruction anywhere in the world ever. The United States had losses of approximately $1 trillion, which is under 10% of its gross domestic product.

A few nights ago, a lady GP appeared on "The Vincent Browne Show", where she described the inequality of the medical services for people in north-west Dublin and the GP resources available to those communities. She told us this in true reality language that the statistics just cannot convey. The same applies to the financial details the Minister for Finance and the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform talk about. We can put flesh and blood on it. We can say that 350,000 people have emigrated. They are the equivalent of the refugees after the world war in Europe - they are our refugees. Then, we can talk about the 100,000 mortgage loans in distress that the two so-called banks are dealing with. They are not dealing with them, and I have first-hand experience of this. They are operationally out of control - OOOC. They are not doing what they should and could be doing as professionals.

There are approximately 100,000 mortgage loans in that situation, and these account for approximately 350,000 human beings - mothers, fathers, teenagers, children and so on. They are more refugees. They are imprisoned for the next ten years at least, or even 20 years, because they are hopeless cases that are not being dealt with properly by the banks in restructuring terms. The evidence is there to show it. I am not going to waste time trying to give the House instances of it; I have the instances. That is wrong. Then, there are 90,000 families on housing waiting lists which, at three people per household, is another 270,000 souls. They are hurting, and we have seen the acute expression of that in the sad and tragic death of Jonathan Corrie. That is the progression and where it can lead. Some 800 children sleep at night in beds that are not in their home, and that is wrong.

We have unequal distribution of the burden of finding revenues for the State to carry out the investments and make the payments for public services. There has been a failure of imagination and this Bill is a leviathan or behemoth expression of the failure of imagination as to what to do. We need reconditioned reservoirs, water treatment plants and pipes. It is a bill of about €10 billion, as the quantity surveyors - the experts - have told us. We are going to try to do it on a hand-to-mouth basis, levying taxation on the families I have just described, while the MNC corporates have paid nothing towards the national recovery, despite the fact their profits have not fallen like the incomes of our people have fallen. The evidence is there on the reported profits - their own reported profits - that they actually increased their revenues since 2008, and there has been no incremental contribution to rebuilding our country.

That is a shame and it is wrong. Water charges and the property tax are just creating two new bureaucracies which must collect the money from the families who are the subject of the invoices and who will not be able to dismantle their houses in the case of the property tax, so it will come out of their incomes. The same will happen with water charges, which will come out of their incomes. If their incomes have fallen and there are charges which are going up - which are not called income tax or USC - on those incomes, they are paying more in taxation. It is regressive because the people who have done better have only the same quantum - fixed amount - per volume of the so-called service of water, or per house. A house is only a small proportion of a multimillionaire's wealth, so it is regressive. That is the failure of imagination to deal with the financial destruction that occurred, which was the largest ever in the history of the modern world.

IMF loans are not being repaid. They are being refinanced. Unfortunately, our national broadcaster says that we are repaying the IMF loans. We are not really doing this. We are borrowing at slightly cheaper rates to replace the loans that were more expensive, which should never have been as expensive as they were initially when they were doled out to us. Telling the story that way is not truthful or imaginative. It is all being done because we are not seeing the right pace in addressing the problems, the right honesty in measuring them and the right fairness in spreading the cost of them. On 28 December, which is only three weeks away, the noble people of Ballyhea will carry out their 200th peaceful protest march to say that the people of Ireland should have never have been burdened with the loan losses of Anglo Irish Bank, which are now a quantum amount of €25 billion of promissory bonds. They are right, because out of €25 billion, €10 billion could be allocated for reservoirs, treatment plants and pipes, leaving €15 billion to replace the pension funds that are now creaking at the joints for the older people and pensioners of this country, hospitals and gardaí. We heard this morning that Dublin is a no-go place at night or even in the afternoon or morning. It is a menacing place to go because crime is visibly taking place on the streets. I can look out my window in LH2000 and see unfortunate people taking heroin. It is sad and it should not be happening.

Before he left two years ago, Ashoka Mody, the director the IMF delegation that came here, encouraged us not to tolerate these unjust loans, which are the remnant of that financial destruction, and not to allow the unfair burden of the cost of this to be imposed under the Whip system of massive majority government on the people of Ireland. That is what is wrong. Deputy Terence Flanagan spoke about a proposed amendment to the Constitution which would ensure that the parliamentarians elected to this House and the Seanad would be representative of all of the people - those who have to pay these water charges - that they would not be bound by the orders or instructions of unfair policies and that they would be responsible to that obligation and their solemn duty to the people of Ireland by being responsible to their consciences in that context. We really-----

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