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

A Residential Tenancies Board adjudicator will hear a case tomorrow which will show what vulture funds are all about. The case will be heard in Cork city and concerns the city's Leeside apartments complex. The apartments were bought by a vulture fund, Lewis Capital, late last year. Its plan is to evict using major refurbishment as the weapon of choice, to raise rents and to get new tenants in to pay those rents. More than 25 households, many of them young families with children, have been issued with notices to quit at a time when the homelessness levels in the State have surged over the 9,000 mark and are at all-time record high levels. Tomorrow's case is the first challenge at the Residential Tenancies Board to these eviction notices. As soon as a result is known, I will communicate it via social media. The very fact that the point at issue is the eviction of men, women and children for sheer profit is a sign of what we are dealing with when we discuss vulture funds.

The Bill is proposing the regulation of the vulture funds. This is not controversial and I think there will be unanimous support for it in the House. We will support it on these benches. However, for us, regulation does not go nearly far enough. A regulated vulture is still a vulture. The vulture funds, as was mentioned, are not included in the code of conduct on mortgage arrears. PTSB has 18,000 loans that it is putting up for sale and Ulster Bank has 7,000, making 25,000 in total, with other banks still to come. Some 4,000 of the PTSB loans are buy-to-lets. This is an example of what might happen if the vultures get their claws into these houses and these people's lives. Where vultures buy these loans and make settlements with the landlords, whether it is the landlord paying their price or selling at another price, those residents will inevitably be faced with rent hikes. I am sure quite a few of them will be faced with rent hikes that go well beyond the rent pressure zone limits, with the example of major refurbishments coming into play once again. This again shows the importance of the hearing tomorrow.

Many will face eviction if they are unable to pay the rent increases. In such a situation tenants have a possible remedy in applying political pressure when the mortgages are effectively owned by the State., but it is a far less attractive proposition to try to exert political pressure when the mortgages are owned by a vulture fund. On no condition should the loans be sold to vulture funds. They should not be allowed to get their claws on people's homes and lives. If emergency legislation is required to exclude the possibility of a sale to vulture funds, it should be passed by the House.

To deal with the distressed mortgages underlying this problem in a proper and humane way, it is necessary to have a banking system which provides for the interests of ordinary people, not one which provides for the interests of the markets. For us, that means opposing bank privatisation and supporting a genuine State banking system with boards that serve the people rather than the markets. If such measures were in place, several creative options could come into play: the retrospective revaluation of houses to pre-Celtic tiger price rates, allowing for inflation in the period since; the scheduling of affordable mortgage repayments for those who are able to meet them and the provision of a mortgage-to-rent scheme for those who are not in a position to repay their mortgages, a measure which would increase by thousands the local authority housing stock. When we talk about vulture funds, we talk about capitalism "red in tooth and claw". For ordinary working class people faced with an enemy - vulture funds are the enemy of working people - "red in tooth and claw", it is necessary to push for legislative change, but one also has to be prepared to organise and fight, to use people power to resist evictions on a large scale.

If the Leeside residents win tomorrow before the Residential Tenancies Board, it will be merely a victory in the first round of the fight. They will have knocked back the vulture fund on the issue of notices to quit, but they will still face the threat of eviction by way of rent increases. If they do not win or further attempts are made to evict them, they will have little option but to fight. Where are the affordable rental properties in the cities of Cork, Dublin, Limerick or anywhere else? They will have little option but to stay and I encourage them to do so, to refuse to leave and organise solidarity among their fellow residents and hundreds of supporters in the city to resist evictions, the vulture funds and the agenda of the blood sucking greedy capitalism that so many residents and homeowners are facing.

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