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

Despite all the great efforts taken by political parties and Governments to manipulate the narrative around politics in this country in order to convince the public that they are doing this, that or the other and the parliamentary games that have been regularly played on a large scale in recent weeks - such as ramming legislation through at a rate of knots and all those games in which the big parties in particular specialise - when the history of this period is written, what will be recorded will not be all the PR, spin, manipulation and tricks, it will be the fact that the two major parties allowed the banks and those who profiteer from property to destroy the economy and create an unprecedented period of austerity and hardship for the citizens of this country and then allowed the conditions which led to the latter to re-emerge rather than tackling the fundamental reasons for it happening in the first instance. The housing crisis, the mortgage arrears crisis, the rental crisis and the homelessness crisis all revolve around that fact. Even now, in the aftermath of the disaster that was inflicted, this Government does not want to stand up to the banks. That is just putting it simply.

If 80,000 people are in mortgage arrears and 33,000 of them are in arrears for two years or more and have the real prospect of losing their homes, the Government is willing to allow that to happen as long as we do not annoy the banks or upset somebody's notion of private property and the rights relating thereto. I always wonder when reference is made to the Constitution and the protections relating to private property. When we argued for rent controls, the Government said it could not be done. Strangely enough, however, the Government - under a lot of pressure - brought in a very limited form of rent control at the end of last year. Suddenly it could be done and no legal issues emerged. I do not believe all that nonsense and much as I hold Fianna Fáil responsible for getting us into this mess, I agree that the Bill should pass Second Stage because it is doing something that we proposed in an extensive series of amendments to the personal insolvency legislation when it was originally introduced, namely, that the Insolvency Service of Ireland should be allowed to enforce solutions for people in mortgage distress in order to ensure they do not lose their homes.

I am not sure if Fianna Fáil voted with us when we put that forward. I hope that they did, to show a little bit of consistency. Our proposal was written out in great detail. I wrote the amendments myself at great length. Fine Gael would not do it then, however.

It is all because Fine Gael wants to protect the banks. That is the reality, with all the suffering that flows from it. It is not just about the mortgage arrears crisis which this Bill deals with but also the wider housing crisis. Worse than that, the Government is resurrecting the conditions that led to all this by allowing and facilitating the sale of vast amounts of property assets to vulture funds which are evicting people and gaining even greater control over property prices, rents and so on. The Government is facilitating a worsening of the situation. It beggars belief. The least the Government could do is let this Bill, which is trying to address one aspect of it, go through Second Stage in order that we can discuss it.

See this speech in context