Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

I will start with a question. How many solicitors does AIB have? I am not talking about the hired guns they hire from outside the bank. I am talking about in-house solicitors employed by the bank. According to the Law Society, the answer to that question is 114. If one were to take those 114 solicitors, cut them adrift from AIB and set them up as a separate company, it would be the seventh largest law firm in the State. That is the little army of solicitors employed by one bank alone. What chance does an ordinary citizen have against a machine like that?

It could be argued the ordinary citizen has access to civil legal aid. In reality, for the vast majority of citizens, that is not the case. A person does not have a chance of getting civil legal aid unless he or she earns below the €18,000 per year threshold. A Bill such as the Multi-Party Actions Bill 2017, which would allow a form of class action and allow people to band together to take a joint case against the likes of a bank or powerful institution is a progressive reform. It is a step forward. It is something that Solidarity-People Before Profit will support going to the next Stage. It is not a magic wand. The legal system is very biased against the ordinary man and woman. This does not create a level playing pitch but if the Bill is passed it means the playing pitch is not as unbalanced or as tilted against the ordinary person as it was the day before.

We see what powerful institutions like banks do when they feel they have a free hand. The tracker mortgage scandal is a case in point. To date, there have been more than 27,500 cases that we know of. On account of this scandal, 23 mortgageholders have lost their homes and 79 people have lost their homes as a result of buy-to-let properties being repossessed. This was not a mistake. It is not something that was magicked up by a computer or a robot. It was a conscious cold-blooded decision made by men and women in the senior management of the banks to rob and defraud ordinary citizens and householders. If the Multi-Party Action Bill in even a small way can redress that imbalance of power and allow ordinary citizens to strike out for justice on an issue such as this, it would be a positive thing.

The Bill would not just relate to people ripped off by the banks in the tracker mortgage scandal. It would relate to people dealing with profit-hungry developers who have ripped them off on the pyrite scandal. It would also relate to the State which has treated people scandalously in the likes of the Magdalen laundries and so on. It is telling that we do not have class action legislation of this kind in the State. The absence of legislation such as this says a lot about the Fianna Fáil Party and the Fine Gael Party which have led Governments down through the years. It is shameful that the Government is setting its face against this legislation. We will not do so. We will back it and will continue the discussion on the next Stage.

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