Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I did not hear Deputy Donnelly's speech yesterday but I received an e-mail from somebody who did, who had e-mailed me last February about her mortgage and engagement with the financial institution that used to be Irish Nationwide and became IBRC. It is telling about what is at stake in all of this. I will read out a little of what the person says:

I am an IBRC mortgage holder with a performing (just about so far) loan that has just been sold to Mars Capital No 3 Ltd. An unregulated fund. I have stood outside the Dail with other mortgage holders trying to get this government to see sense but no, Michael Noonan had no regard for me or any ordinary person caught up in the Government's liquidation of IBRC. So I wanted to know who will I be dealing with. Who is Mars Capital No3 ltd? I did some research on CRO.ie and discovered that Mars Capital No 3 Ltd had until January 15th, two directors one of whom had the same name as a person who held a senior position in IBRC in the past and who was also in the past an employee of KPMG the firm of liquidators. That surprised me but I am an ordinary person unused to looking at company documents. In recent days that director stood down and another is appointed per new documents lodged with the CRO. The other fact I discovered is that the company has three share holders - all of them charitable trusts which I googled and are associated, I think with a Dublin legal firm. They are named Badb, Medb and Eurydice. What in the name of God has charity got to do with it??? Who would use charitable trusts? Why charitable trusts? Who owns my loan? I am still none the wiser ... I believe this has to be examined. Why hide behind charitable trusts? I took my loan out with a building society not a charity. I stand to be corrected but the charitable trusts concerned may have been in the news in the past. I think I am entitled at least to know who owns my loan considering my government has done the selling.

I will inform people, if they do not know, that the charitable trusts were owned by Ireland's biggest corporate tax firm, Matheson, which has been in the news because it was using these three companies to help international hedge funds avoid tax. The Central Bank has reported on the use of these charitable trusts. They are apparently registered to relieve poverty and distress but actually help hedge funds and banks pay billions less in tax in the area of high risk assets. The Central Bank has warned that these structures are potentially extremely dangerous because we do not really know anything about them. This says everything about the web of connections between corporate accountancy firms, the financial institutions that we bailed out, and handing over the mortgages of ordinary people to vultures engaged in aggressive tax avoidance. That same institution gets a write-off but the person who e-mailed me does not get a write-off. They do not get a discount and do not even know who now owns their loan but we discover that the people who own the loan are a legal firm assisting people in tax evasion - I should say "tax avoidance," as I have to use the technically correct term. This same institution can write off €119 million to the benefit of the richest man in Ireland, Mr. Denis O'Brien, who is not tax resident in this country. Apparently he does not live here, although his kids go to school here and he has a yacht in Roundstone, County Galway. Deputy Murphy and I have said these things. In the middle of 2012, when I made some of these points and suggested the Mafia would have something to learn from some of the dealings of the rich in this country, I had the privilege of receiving a letter from Mr. Denis O'Brien castigating me for abusing my Dáil position, with a thinly veiled warning that I had better stop doing it. That is what goes on. Ordinary people like the woman who wrote to me, and thousands of other mortgage holders, some of whom lost their homes, are screwed to the wall by unsustainable mortgage payments and all the devastating consequences beyond that. Some €34 billion of the €64 billion total went into Anglo. All this devastation wrecked the lives of ordinary people, yet this stuff is going on where tax refugees like Denis O'Brien benefit. What was the other write-off he got? Independent News & Media, in which he had a major shareholding - I forgot about it - also had more than €100 million written off. He has done well out of IBRC. That is the sort of stuff that goes on.

I support Judge Cregan's request and the legislation here to give him the powers to look into all of this. As Deputy Murphy asked, why did it take us this long to get here? These points were first raised back in 2012 and the Minister and Government had to be dragged along kicking and screaming, obfuscating and resisting at every point the sort of investigation that was necessary into this sort of stuff. It appears to the innocent observer, such as the person who sent me this e-mail and the majority of citizens in this country, to be simply that there is one law for the rich and one for everybody else. The economic crisis was produced by the greed of a tiny network of super-wealthy people positioned in the banks and accountancy firms, often with quite strong associations with some of the major political parties in the country. I remind people about the Moriarty report and its findings on Denis O'Brien's relationship to a former Fine Gael Minister and a transaction in which he got the second mobile phone licence that enriched him overnight.

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