Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Welcome to the bizarre, surreal and labyrinthine world of financial capitalism in the early 21st century. That is about all I can say when I consider this Bill and what it is trying to deal with. It is difficult to know where to start. Of course, this is part of the problem faced by ordinary human beings trying to do simple things like put a roof over their heads. How simple these things were once upon a time. Now when a person tries to put a roof over his head, he is faced with problems that are summed up with the following statement from one of the helpful guides on Bills given to Deputies by the Oireachtas Library and Research Service - I love this stuff:

In short, the institutions that typically purchase loan books in order to service them are structured in such a way that the legal entity which employs people to service said loan books is a separate entity than the one that owns the loan book. This means that the owner of the loan book would be regulated but the entity that interacts with the customer would not be.

It is like something from a science fiction novel. In fact, it would not be a bad first paragraph in a science fiction novel, because we are not dealing with human beings, the bank manager down the road or any substantial being. We are dealing with an entity that is also a special purpose vehicle.

I am unsure whether the Minister has ever read Iain Banks. He is a fantastic Scottish science fiction novelist who used science fiction and space opera to create analogies for the madness of modern capitalism. The big spaceships that dominate the universe in his books are also called SPVs. This is exactly where we are at. SPVs are floating around the global financial markets looking for opportunities to make money. No one knows who is driving these vehicles: they are simply entities. These entities are swooping down on the mortgage books of the poor unsuspecting human being who lives in an estate somewhere in Dublin or Cork and who is simply trying to put a roof over his head with considerable difficulty. He has been battered by the consequences of the financial madness and corporate gambling of the past ten or 20 years. Then, down from outer space comes the SPV, driven by the entity, which is not regulated by anything and which no one knows about or understands but which will soon have control of the person's mortgage. It is totally bizarre.

We may ask how we got to here, whether we have learned any lessons about the mess that we are in, the causes of that mess or how we got to this pass. However, we only have to read some of the reportage to know that we have learned absolutely nothing whatsoever and we are about to do it again. The Irish Timesfrom 19 January has a headline: "Record year for investment in Irish commercial property". The article begins:

Investment in Irish commercial property reached a record high in 2014, with some €4.5 billion invested. This represents a 25 per cent increase on the previous peak of €3.6 billion reached in 2006.

My God, we are now surpassing the level of gambling in the property market in Ireland in 2006, two years before an absolutely catastrophic crash that beggared the nation and for which our children and grandchildren will be paying the cost. It produced unsustainable debt that has been loaded onto their backs as well as the crushing austerity, injustice, unfairness and inequality that goes with it. It could almost be funny if we looked at it as science fiction, but when we get down to the human reality underneath it is not funny at all; it is tragic and terrible. It produces anxiety, worry, terror, uncertainty, homelessness, the loss of homes and evictions.

That is how it translates at the level of human reality. The Government will state the Bill attempts to extend a little regulation to the entity and the SPV floating somewhere in the financial markets, the spaceship that is hoovering up mortgage books and loans, and that at least it is trying to extend some regulation to this madness. The problem is that we allowed this to happen in the first place after what happened in 2006, 2007 and 2008. The Minister and the Government have facilitated the hand-over of loan books and the mortgages of real human beings to these entities. They have allowed it to happen. Then, after the fact, they say, "Oh my God, we had better do something to regulate it because the Central Bank regulations do not cover it." They are trying to extend the code of conduct on mortgage arrears to these entities and SPVs, or their "credit servicing firms". I am sorry, but I forgot about those because the matter is even more complicated than I explained. The irony is that we cannot regulate the SPVs because they are not banks; therefore, we have to regulate the service companies they employ to manage and administer mortgages. It becomes even more labyrinthine as we go along. We do not know with whom we are dealing. We are not dealing with the SPV or the entity driving it; rather, we are dealing with a shuttle that has been sent from the main spaceship to planet Earth to pick up the mortgages and loans. It is totally bizarre and mad.

The Government has facilitated this by allowing the sale of loan books when, of course, many of the mortgage holders asked whether they could buy back their own mortgages. No, we could not have that. We could not have something simple such as people being able to buy their own mortgages in order that there would be some relationship with real human beings and the things they need, namely, a secure roof over their heads and some knowledge of who owned the loan, but no, that would be far too simple. Instead, we must sell to the subcontractor of the entity in the spaceship. Why? There is logic behind it from the Government's point of view, namely, selling off all of these things as quick as it can to get some cash back in order that it will be able to say it has recovered some of the cost of the shocking, outrageous and unfair bailout of the banks and other financial institutions and in order that it can put out a statement, like many it has put out before, stating, "We have covered the cost of the bank bailout. NAMA is going to pay for itself. It is all fine - really. We have done a wonderful job". The truth is, however, that the country is being sold from under our feet. The mortgage books and property assets are being sold to the spaceships, the SPVs, the vulture funds, to the alien entities that do not give a damn about human beings here, the economy or whether people have a roof over their heads and who are just in it for money. It is amazing.

As a socialist, I am actually becoming nostalgic for the old-fashioned bank because we now have these entities that are not even the old-fashioned banks to which one could go. I have been banking with Ulster Bank for years. I am a socialist and want to nationalise all of the banks, but now I have real nostalgia for the old days when one could go to the Ulster Bank brank in Blackrock and actually talk to a human being and there was some accountability, which we do not now have. We are going to talk to the subcontractor of the vulture fund in the special purpose vehicle. One will call the bank in Blackrock and get through to a call centre in Scotland which will reroute it.

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