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

It is as simple as that. They own the banks but they will not tell the banks that they cannot repossess family homes at will. That is what is happening and it should be admitted by the Government.

The Minister gave a critique of Deputy McGrath's Bill. I have studied the Bill and I, too, have some doubts about aspects of it and how it will work in practice. However, unlike the Government, Sinn Féin recognises the Bill as a genuine effort and all these issues can be dealt with on Committee Stage. We can deal with the issues raised by the Government, such as the constitutional red herring or any of the other issues such as the definition of a family home. From the point of view of Sinn Féin, the process outlined in the legislation has a couple of weaknesses. For example, there is the question of at what point and on what grounds other than correctly filed paperwork, can the Insolvency Service of Ireland or the courts refuse an application even in justified circumstances. This question is not adequately answered. The other question is how can the Insolvency Service of Ireland not find that an application is an attempt to frustrate the efforts of a mortgagee to recover debts due to him or her. In my view, the whole point of the process is to frustrate that effort to stop the repossession of the family home. This can be further debated on Committee Stage. One should not throw out the baby with the bath water.

The Bill I brought forward last April was similar to this Bill but it was stronger legislation because it also dealt with issues such as residual debt and it placed the cost of the process on the banks. Nevertheless, I recognise that this Bill is a genuine attempt to make the Government face this issue and that is very welcome.

We know that this Government will not face the issue. We know the Government has its own narrative agenda; it wants to focus on headline economic growth figures, despite the debatable nature of that growth. It does not wish to engage with issues such as people losing their family home or the banks bullying or intimidating the very people who bailed them out. The stories of families across the State who are waking up every morning in fear of losing their homes does not fit in with the Fine Gael narrative but it is a reality for far too many families.

It is the reality that this Government has created. It came to power four years ago and promised to deal with the mortgage crisis. Just like its attempt to deal with the banking debt, it has failed miserably. Today the Greek Parliament has passed a similar Bill even the Greek Government is not in power for four weeks, never mind four years. That Bill is designed to protect family homes from repossession. This has shown us that there are choices. By contrast, this Government removed the block on repossession of family homes. The Labour Party and Fine Gael have sided with the banks in this crisis, and that was the deal they struck.

Since March 2011, there has been a definite pattern of facilitating the banks to do whatever they wanted, including repossession of family homes. We have seen revision of the code of conduct on mortgage arrears after a so-called consultation period, when civic society and those who worked with those in mortgage debt called for greater protections. They have seen so many people under pressure and they can foresee what will happen when the protections are relaxed. The Central Bank, without a whimper of protest from the Labour Party, stripped down the protections given to struggling homeowners. It was a cold and calculated decision to let the banks off the leash. To complement this decision, the Government had to go further. It needed a legal move in the form of the Land and Conveyancing Law Reform Act, the most shameful of a long list of shameful actions taken by this Government. The Gunn judgment was the one legal stop holding back the banks and it was removed. The inevitable results are now before us in the hundreds and thousands of repossessions each week in the courts.

On RTE radio today, Mr. Ross Maguire of New Beginning indicated that there are 218 cases in Limerick, 131 in Ennis, 58 in Naas and 100 in Dublin every week. In my county of Donegal, there are 271 cases. So extreme is the situation that the courts have had to create their own lists and sittings to deal with it.

If this crisis is not addressed, we will have seen nothing yet. The problem is only going to get greater, the banks will get bolder and the repossessions will continue. Yet we are told not to worry, that the troika, Government and Central Bank are happy, and the banks are meeting their targets and back making a profit. What we are not told is that those targets are being met because the Central Bank, with the Government's full support no matter how much it claims otherwise, has allowed repossessions and legal actions to count as solutions under those targets. The European Commissions has indicated that half of the arrangements involve legal proceedings and the courts are straining under the pressure.

We are told the recession is over and we should stop being negative. That is the mantra from Government. I apologise for delivering a dose of reality to the Minister by showing that the repossession crisis is real and escalating. Moreover, the Government has facilitated that crisis and ignored those who warned it was coming. Only one month ago, at a meeting of the justice committee where the Personal Insolvency (Amendment) Bill 2014 was being examined on Committee Stage, our party spokesperson on justice, Deputy Pádraig Mac Lochlainn, was the only member to put forward an amendment to remove the banks' veto. That proposal was rejected by the Government. We have an Administration in denial about this issue. I attended meetings of the finance committee with other Members who are here today where bank CEOs told us they would use their veto in every single circumstance over an insolvency arrangement if it involved the writing down of mortgage debt held by them.

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