Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I wish to tell the Minister a little story of a family with three children, one of whom has specials needs, that I have dealt with over a number of years. The parents found themselves in difficulty with their mortgage despite the fact that both of them are working. One of them became ill due to the stress associated with trying to deal with the bank. When I was Minister for Social Protection I set up a scheme called Abhaile so that mortgage holders in distress would be helped by the Money Advice & Budgeting Service, MABS, which was authorised on a regional basis and a local basis to accompany people to court. As the Minister knows, because we discussed this in government over many a long month, it took a long time to set it up, but it is operating now as is the personal insolvency practitioner structure. However, despite all that, we hear back that, no matter what happens, banks are still reluctant to engage. In the particular case to which I referred, the family went through the full year of the mortgage arrears resolution process and paid everything that was required. Not only that, when the parents got a small increase in their income, they increased their payment. Nonetheless, and this is not atypical, the day the MARP period finished, during which, notwithstanding the difficulties they were in, they had agreed to everything and done everything that was required, the bank issued them with a notification stating that it would seek to repossess the house. In the Government that the Minister and I were members of, it was a primary principle that we would seek to protect people in their family homes. In this particular case, the bank included-----

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