Willie Penrose (Longford-Westmeath, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Exactly. This Government is proud to have overhauled Ireland's bankruptcy legislation, thereby leapfrogging the 20th century and replacing harsh and unforgiving Victorian attitudes - debtors prisons - with the principles of welfare and equal treatment that are the bedrock of the modern Republic that Connolly and Pearse gifted to us with their lives. The aim of this Bill is to give people a second chance so that they can return to normal economic activity as soon as possible. We have to move on from the idea of punishing people who engaged in normal economic activity but suffered economic misfortune due to adverse economic circumstances which nobody could predict. It is vindictiveness at its basic level if we continue down that road. Had other countries continued down that road, people such as Henry Ford, Abraham Lincoln and Walt Disney would have been denied an opportunity to return to economic activity. Northern Ireland has not fallen apart because it introduced a one-year bankruptcy rule.

We have achieved a lot but we need now to address some minor technical amendments, which are self-explanatory, including the re-vesting of ownership in the family home, which proposal my daughters were instrumental in bringing to the fore and which is essential to the psyche of the nation's mental health and self-esteem. We need to eliminate the wholly unnecessary and embarrassing statutory court sitting and, most importantly, reduce the bankruptcy period to 12 months. Today, we have the opportunity to stimulate the recovery of the forgotten. In reducing the bankruptcy period from three years to 12 months we do so not only to align ourselves with modern nations but because it is the right and proper thing to do. As parliamentarians, it is our obligation to ensure this is done.

The wording of the The 1916 Proclamation come to mind at this point. I am reminded that Connolly and Pearse pledged themselves not only to the obvious cause of Ireland's freedom but, as they seized their moment to declare Ireland a Republic and a sovereign State, so, too, did they proclaim and pledge themselves to the cause of the welfare of the Irish people. This is the cause of the Labour Party also. It is on the subject of the welfare of the Irish people that I particularly address this House today. The heroes of 1916 declared the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland, to the unfettered control of Irish destinies and, as a nation, to free us from the yoke of usurpation of a foreign government and people. In that great endeavour, they largely succeeded.

However, for a great many of Irish people - not just anonymous statistics but real families in real communities in real homes across this land - the yoke of usurpation by foreign people weighs heavily upon real people. That usurpation has worsened with the mass sale of the worth of people's lives to hedge funds and other unregulated entities owned by the very foreigners from whom Connolly and Pearse tried to free us. I speak today not of foreign governments, because that usurpation has been consigned to history, but about the usurpation of the lives of the people of Ireland by invading hedge funds and unregulated entities who have landed on our shores in fleets of private jets. I am not here today to make apologies for real people who followed the trusted advice heaped upon them by banks and financial institutions, who while insolvent, pushed money on the people. As Deputy Mathews has often said they knew what they were doing was wrong.

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