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

It is ominous, sinister and deeply worrying that cases involving debt have been removed from Mr. Edmund Honohan. He challenged the ruthlessness and brutality of these banks and vulture funds in how they dealt with people in mortgage distress who were trying to engage with them, and called them out for their ruthlessness. This matter is related to what we are debating here and the way in which the Government, in defending its opposition to this eminently humane Bill, makes reference to the potential impact on the global financial system and the system of securitisation of loans which lay at the back of the global crash of 2008. The Government is defending that.

The position under the Central Bank's voluntary code was that what this Bill proposes should, in fact, be the situation and people's mortgages should not be sold without their consent. However, the Government says that code was introduced 20 years ago and things have moved on since then. What has moved on is that the banking and financial system now depends on the securitisation of these loans in order to function. According to the Government, that is the reason we cannot do what the Central Bank, until recently, believed we should do when it comes to dealing with these loans and the relationship between the borrower and the lender.

One could be forgiven for concluding, as I do, that the Government's response to this Bill is to simply forget about the human being. The vast majority of people who were in front of Mr. Edmund Honohan, or in front of the courts, are just ordinary, decent human beings who, in good faith, obtained loans to put a roof over their heads because that is the only way vast numbers of people can get a roof over their heads. These people did not seek to rip off the banks and society but to put a roof over their heads, notwithstanding whether their loans are performing or non-performing loans. The bottom fell out of the economy because of the actions of the financial institutions and others speculating on property and driving the property market out of control. That was not the fault of ordinary people with either performing or non-performing loans. The idea seems to be that those people somehow have to take the rap to protect a financial system that is out of control. The fact that the financial system was out of control was what landed us all in this mess in the first place. The Government is defending that and has used it as its defence against a Bill that provides that people should have the right to consent or not consent to the sale of the mortgage loan they agreed with their bank or mortgage lender. I am trying to remember the type of lender Permanent TSB is.

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