Thomas Pringle (Donegal South West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I, too, welcome the opportunity to contribute to the debate this evening and will fully support the legislation. It does not surprise anybody on this side of the House that the Government will not accept the Bill because it is about benefiting the small people who do not have the connections, who are struggling to survive and keep a roof over their heads. They are the people who do not really matter to the Government and have been the cannon fodder for the crisis and the recession. They cannot talk to special receivers and make a verbal agreement to ease things for them in the new dispensation. They constantly struggle, and the Government refuses to represent them.

Over the past four years we had to be such good Europeans. We had to take one for Europe, bail out our banks and ensure that no European bank would fail. We did that by putting ourselves to the pin of our collar, destroying our economy and doing untold damage to our society. However, when Members on this side of the House point out that the rest of Europe enjoys interest rates on variable rate mortgages that are at least 2% lower than the Irish average, we are told there is nothing we can do about it. How is it that we can pick and choose what kind of Europeans we are? We can be good Europeans when we put ourselves into destruction by bailing out banks, but we cannot be good Europeans in hoping and expecting to avail of the same kind of interest rates other European citizens enjoy? That is the type of European citizens the Government wants us to be and the type of Europe we are in - citizens who kowtow and tip the hat to Europe and say, "We will take everything you give us, we will take all the medicine you insist we take and will not look for anything in return that would benefit our citizens".

It is a sad reflection of why the Government is resisting the Bill so much and why it has resisted dealing with the mortgage crisis for so long. This crisis was first raised in the lifetime of this Dáil by the Technical Group in May 2011 during Private Members' business. We flagged that the crisis was coming down the road, but the Government refused to listen. The Government simply considers its role to be to bail out banks and save the European Union without benefiting the citizens of the State.

Over the past few months, much has been made in the media of the banks returning to profitability. It is reported that the banks are recovering and getting back to where they should have been, and that we can look forward to selling off part of them to recover some of the cost we put in to bailing them out. However, Deputies in this House have been at work outlining the differences in the interest rates and showing how the variable rate mortgage holders are the ones returning the banks to profitability. There are 300,000 variable rate mortgage holders paying over the odds in terms of interest rates, which could be costing each of them somewhere in the region of €4,000 to €6,000 per year in extra interest. That works out at over €1.2 billion to €1.8 billion in extra profits for the banks. Coincidentally, that is about the amount of extra profit they made this year. It is on the backs of those citizens that the banks are returning to profitability. Once again, it is a false economy. Although the Government claims to be driving a recovery, it is actually on the backs of citizens and vulnerable people.

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