Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am delighted to have the opportunity to speak on the Bill, acknowledging that it is a Private Members' Bill and notwithstanding the fate of those in the ordinary course of events. I congratulate Fianna Fáil on bringing the matter before the House at this time. It is an issue many Members have dealt with privately and face to face with banks in recent years. My history on this goes back to 2008, when the issue first raised its head.

What we need as a matter of urgency is support for those who find themselves under pressure. I hold no brief for those who have made no attempt to deal with their debt problems. The fact is that there are a great many people out there who I, and I am sure many Members, have advised that they must pay something. They must pay what they can. Many people have done that and they are entitled to be treated with respect. They are entitled to be treated with the same respect with which the banks were treated just a few short years ago when they found themselves in difficulty. The taxpayers of this country - perhaps without their permission, which is a matter for another debate - came to the rescue of the banks and bailed them out. That is what happened. Now, the banking institutions have an opportunity to repay the trust they received in the first instance.

I will not mention banks by name. I have been in and out of most banks in the past years and in the past week as well. I have been in and out of the courts on numerous occasions over the past five or six years along with constituents. Some banks went out of their way to help the borrowers and they were prepared to draw up a restructuring of loans. However, some banks did not do so; they looked at the debt and they decided they would wait until the equity changed and the price of property rose and repossess the property at that stage. Some banks showed no compassion from day one and they were absolutely callous in how they dealt with a borrowers' circumstances and situations. They were certainly not prepared to accommodate borrowers. We need to deal with that kind of situation as a society because it is our duty to stand by people who have made a genuine effort. Some people bought property worth €1 million and they have also taken a hit but I would not expect the State or anyone else to help them to live in that kind of luxury. However, I would expect in the case of a family home that some provision would be made to assist those who might otherwise become homeless on the side of the road. We have a moral obligation to help them.

I sat across the table from a lending institution three times this week with three different customers. I was told that the banks, by their criteria, had determined that the borrowing was unsustainable. This was the same borrowing that the lending institution had afforded the borrower just a few short years ago. Did the bank take into account that the individual might not stay in the same job forever, that circumstances might not remain the same? These circumstances were brought about by the lending institutions' own stupidity, for want of a better description. I will not dwell on the situation where people were loaned money on an interest-only basis with no proposal for repayment, good, bad or indifferent. The lending institution has now informed them that their loans are unsustainable; they were unsustainable the day the loans were awarded in the first place, so I ask what are they talking about.

This Bill is not what I believe is required because we need regulations specifically to oblige the lending institutions to elongate their loans, to extend them over a longer period and to provide for a warehousing of part of that debt for a period of time, just the same as the country was obliged to do because otherwise we would not have survived. Unless the country was given that kind of facility from the IMF and from our European partners, we would not have been able to survive. I congratulate the Government on the tremendous success it has achieved in that area.

The Irish people have been trusting of the lending institutions. They agreed on the necessity to ensure the lending institutions prevailed, that if everything went to the wall then everyone would suffer. There is an opportunity for the Central Bank to put in place regulations to ensure nobody is evicted from a family home once he or she has made an effort - in some cases a valiant effort - to meet his or her commitments.

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