Clare Daly (Dublin Fingal, Independent) | Oireachtas source

We will all benefit from the opportunity to discuss these issues here tonight. There is an acceptance on our part that the scope of the Bill is too broad and there is agreement with some of the points made by some of the other Deputies and an acknowledgement that there may be some mistakes in the drafting. It brings me back to the points made by Deputy Darragh O'Brien that should this progress, it will entail pre-legislative scrutiny at the justice committee. The points made by our colleagues demonstrate that we would be able to get it into much better shape and allow us to address the fundamental issues at the heart of this, which all of us agree need to be addressed, namely, the unbearable stress and nightmare situations faced by people who have debt hanging over them for a substantial period. It can be for decades in some instances with six years waiting for proceedings to start, a year or two of court action and then a judgment mortgage, which can sometimes last for 12 years. In the course of somebody's lifetime that is a huge chunk taken out of it. What is at stake here is not the discharging or writing off of debts. It is actually about allowing debts to be pursued promptly, efficiently and fairly. Deputy Wallace has already made the point that under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which has been binding in Ireland since 2003, each citizen is entitled to a fair and public hearing within a reasonable time. From the comments we have heard there seems to be an acceptance that six years is not a reasonable time, particularly if there is scope for it to be dragged out many years longer than that. I note that the Minister of State, Deputy Finian McGrath, said that we have the commission. The point is that we have had it for six years and it made a very strong recommendation that the Statute of Limitations for a civil contract should be reduced to two years.

It called our current law "inefficient" but this was six years ago and the problem is that the issue has not yet been addressed. The six-year limit was first set out in the limitation Act 1623, meaning it was plucked out of the air by 17th century merchants, which is not really a reason to hang onto it now.

The law and politics of debt in this country lag behind what is happening in reality. We still treat banks as if they are gentlemanly, honest brokers and upright 17th century merchants genuinely and earnestly entering into contracts with individuals with only the best of intentions to extend credit and everything else. Life is not like that and debt is not like that for citizens in this State who are experiencing enormous stress. It is not what banks do any more. The Minister of State, Deputy Finian McGrath, suggests that everything is grand now, that the mortgage situation is sorted out and that we are on the road to recovery but that is not what is being experienced by many of our citizens. We need to put supports in place which ensure people get solutions whereby they can remain in their homes when they have mortgage debt but it should be done efficiently and promptly, not dragged out over years so that the situation hangs over them as their children grow up, meaning they waste the best years of their lives.

A good Rolling Stonearticle in 2012 described the US investment bank, Goldman Sachs, as a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smelt like money. It focused on Goldman Sachs but it could be a description of many, if not most, banks and investment funds. Ireland is a particularly friendly place for banks and is one of the top five tax havens in the world for banks, which get a very good and handy deal here. We need to take these issues into account precisely because of what Deputy Wallace said, namely, that we have a growing market of bottom feeders who are coming into Ireland with only one purpose - to gather up outstanding debt. The vehicles buy up the old debts that banks and other concerns see little point in pursuing after two or three years. These little vampire squid take over the debt, wield the axe of threatened litigation over a debtor for six years and then, in a pincer movement, work to extract the debt by leaning heavily on the debtor without incurring the costs of litigation themselves.

We have to ask if the influx of these bottom feeders into Ireland goes some way to explain why there has not been any move by the Government to address the current Statute of Limitations. The Law Reform Commission recommended it over six years ago but the bottom feeders give the banks plenty of time to sell on their debts to the bottom feeders while the banks pose as great models of forbearance and ordinary householders are squeezed. It is that issue that this Bill is trying to address. We accept that it needs amendment to make it do that but the urgency is clear. Bottom feeders such as Liffey Acquisitions, a Goldman Sachs-owned special purpose vehicle, SPV, bought more than €200 million of Irish commercial property loans in 2014 from Anglo Irish Bank. These SPVs are basically vehicles for avoiding tax and Liffey Acquisitions collected €17.1 million in cash repayments on the loans in its first year. It paid no corporation tax and not a cent in PAYE tax because these companies do not have any employees in Ireland or create any jobs. It is an area that needs huge attention. If we do not address it, we are saying that it is acceptable to leave the axe of unprosecuted debt dangling over ordinary people's heads for six years or more.

There is an irony in this because we are quite happy to let debtors disappear down the memory hole if they are big enough. That, after all, is why NAMA exists. The State picked up the tab for €42 billion in developer debts when NAMA was established That is enough to establish, and fund for 50 years, a single tier public health service, free for everybody to use. The Government cannot bring itself to increase the paltry €35 million subvention to Bus Éireann but finds nothing wrong with handing over billions in public money to be wasted by NAMA. The people whose debts were happily written off have moved on with their lives, many of them carrying on in the same way as before. The Bill does not address all of those issues and it would take a lot more than one Private Members' Bill to halt that situation but we live in a world where debt is a currency and Governments operate the casino of global finance. Any finger on the scales that can balance things even slightly in favour of the ordinary person has to be explored and developed. That is what we are trying to do, albeit imperfectly, and we appeal to the Minister to reconsider getting it into prelegislative scrutiny on Committee Stage.

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