John McGuinness (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I support the Bill and encourage the Government to reconsider its position. All of the contributions I have heard so far, by Deputy Pearse Doherty and his colleagues in Sinn Féin, as well as by Deputy Michael McGrath on this side of the House, have focused on the individual borrower, the person with the mortgage or loan that has gone wrong. I stand beside them, as Deputy Pearse Doherty said he does, including farmers, businesspeople with bad loans and those in mortgage distress who have families and are in difficulty. I do not know how the Minister of State, Deputy Canney, can stand over his contribution as that is not what he stands for or believes in. He read it for the Minister for Finance, Deputy Donohoe. I do not think he read it for himself. Within government and on the Independent benches there is not complete support for the direction it has taken.

When the banks failed, the Government rushed to their support, set out new legislation, declared that it was an emergency, that they were different times which required the type of radical legislation that was implemented at the time. The banks that the Minister is defending have since got back to that position, with €1.6 billion in profits and do not pay tax, while the vulture funds are encouraged by the Government to buy up distressed mortgages and loans, with no accountability to this House. The position might not be as bad if one was to set out the type of legislation required to save the 80,000 or more mortgages that are in distress. They are not just mortgages. They are families and people we know within our communities who are affected by the banks. They did not set out to take out a massive mortgage and build a massive house. We all know the stories of how they went to the banks and came out with almost double what they had gone in for. They came out with car loans for which they had not gone in. They put their confidence in the banks which, not for the first time, led them astray. Now that they are in distress, they are turning to this House and pleading with us to give them some protection against the vulture funds, but the only response from the Government is to trot out a considerable amount of nonsense and misinformation.

Like Deputies Michael McGrath, Fitzmaurice and others, I have gone to meetings with vulture funds. They do not do deals. Even if they did, how does a person with a distressed loan or mortgage raise the money to buy himself or herself out of the problem when he or she has already been reported to the bank, appears on the credit bureau listing and, therefore, cannot obtain credit? The Minister of State, Deputy Canney, said there was only a small number, 83, of repossessions in the names of non-banks. There were 644 by the main banks. The Minister of State should put himself in the position of any one of those families. It does not just happen on one day but over a long time; it could be ten years. That family have to sit with their children, go through the trauma and allow the next generation of younger people to see what it is like to be treated in that way by a bank and a Government that does not care. We are not just ruining the lives of the parents but also those of the children. As we condone the actions of the banks, we are educating the next generation of bankers to be just as disgusting as this lot.

The argument is made that borrowers do not engage with the banks. Any of the people with whom I have dealt has not only engaged with the bank but every single week has written and phoned it. However, there is no engagement. The people concerned want to make an arrangement and honour their commitments. I am not arguing for those who do not want to pay but for those who are decent, have gone through difficulties and want to work their way out of them. We are not giving them the tools necessary to deal with the banks and their legal arm of banks and to assist them to get out of the difficulties in which they find themselves.

The vulture funds do not deals, do not come before this House and are not accountable. The Minister will say all of the protections travel with loans as they pass to the vulture funds, but they really do not in practice. Let us look at the structure involved in Permanent TSB transferring loans to Glenbeigh Securities and then to many other companies, before they finally end up in a trust fund in New York. All of the major houses that make money because of the trauma and desperate situations in which people find themselves are involved with the vulture funds and we do nothing but encourage them. The Central Bank and the European Central Bank are as much to blame. They never talk about the rights of the consumer and never stand over the rights of a whistleblower; rather, they stand full square behind the banks in full support of the terrible damage they do to Irish society and we say nothing.

I want to look at another arm of the State - the courts. I fully understand the separation of powers, but the last port of call for thousands of families is the masters court, where he checks the paperwork from the banks and borrowers. He has forced the banks to correct the paperwork or acknowledge that their paperwork is not adequate to press the charge against an individual concerned before the court.

Most of these individuals are lay litigants, by the way. Having done this and done the State a hell of a service while being fair to the banks and to the borrowers and creating a level playing field, he has now been removed from that task by the President of the High Court

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