Aengus Ó Snodaigh (Dublin South Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I was sorry to hear the previous speech because I had a different speech laid out. Deputy Catherine Byrnehas reminded me that we are here to deal with legislation on civil debt. She spoke a great deal about fairness and is correct that people need to budget. Many families who are now in debt budgeted on the basis of their income. They took out a mortgage and tried to pay the cost of putting their children through school or university in our free education system. Under this and the previous Government, however, they were lumbered out of the blue with new taxes and then had to try to make ends meet.

I am no different from any other Deputy. I know the people about whom Deputy Catherine Byrne was talking. We are in the same constituency. I know many more beyond that who write to me every day saying they do not have the money, so even if they did manage to budget they would not have the extra hours. If they are working they must pay the universal social charge or the pension related deduction which make it very difficult to budget. That leads to debt, whether to a utility company such as the ESB or, in the future, to Irish Water. For many of those people there is a spiral of debt. It is continuous because some of them, maybe foolishly, used a credit card to pay off one debt, which brought a lot of other problems. They might have taken out a bank loan to pay off the credit union loan or a credit card bill and end up paying more interest than people in any country in the European Union bar, probably, Greece. The mortgage rate here is 2% higher than in Britain. This Government has been in charge for four years and the previous Government made a bags of things before that. This all led to problems for people who are trying to budget. No one denies that in a fair society everyone should pay their own way. There are people, however, who will end up in court under this legislation who literally cannot afford to pay.

I received an e-mail this morning from a woman with a five month old child who has been told by Irish Water and an independent consultant not to drink the water in her house because there is lead in it. She managed to scrape together the money to test the water. When she asked Irish Water what it would do about this, it told her that is her hard luck, it is on her premises and she has to pay for it. The cost for her to fix that water is in the region of €3,000 to €5,000. I know this because some time ago I lived for many years in a council house and decided to do the same. I changed the pipe from the road to the door and the main pipe in the house. There was lead in the pipes and they were buckling. Part of this legislation is for utility companies. Irish Water could charge this woman in the future even though she did not get proper water. It says it is not responsible but that it is her fault because she cannot come up with the money to fix a problem in the house, which is the same in many local authority houses in this city.

We need to bear in mind that people get into debt for various reasons. They do not have the luxury that some of the top bankers or speculators have who have managed to get their debts written down. There is no write-down for these people in major debt. Under this legislation they will be told hard luck. Granted, they are not going to jail. I have argued for many years that they should not go to jail. There has to be another way for people in debt to utility companies to pay or make some kind of recompense or for the companies' balance sheets to have a mechanism for writing down bad debtors.

We are making sure that there will be no provision made in the annual accounts for bad debtors because they can chase them. That is what the Bill allows. As Deputy Catherine Byrne said, the companies will apply, as the waste management companies did, to sell the debt. That is even more galling. They will sell the debt to a private company and tell it to recover it in whatever way it wants. It might be owed €10 million and sell that debt for €3 million or €4 million, telling the buyer to pursue these people through the courts and get whatever it can out of them. There is no provision in the Bill to prevent that happening.

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