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

No, there is a name for institutions like Permanent TSB. In any case, I am referring to banks and other forms of mortgage lenders. I do not accept the Government's defence for one minute because it means the human being goes out the window. It inflicts cruel anxiety and hardship on people who sought those loans in good faith. If borrowers have got into trouble with repayments, in the vast majority of cases it was not of their making. Deputy McGuinness and I have plenty of experience with people in these circumstances.

When the chief executive officers of the banks appear before the Joint Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach they state that all will be fine if people just engage with their bank. From direct experience of dealing with people, I know that trying to engage with the banks and find somebody to talk to in the banks is often like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Sometimes, the only reason people manage to get a bit engagement is that a Deputy who, like me, has a line through the committee steps in and he or she may get the phone number of the CEO. Those are the lengths to which people have to go to get a meeting between two human beings to discuss the case. Even then, a reasonable solution may not be found because a week or month later different officials will be dealing with the case and may say they do not remember there was a meeting or this, that or the other. It goes on and on and, at the same time, the letters and threats keep coming from the bank. These terrify people who then end up in court facing threats of repossession.

This Bill proposes to bring this back down to a human level. It provides that the individuals who sought loans to put a roof over their heads would have the right to insist that the institution that gave them the loan maintain the existing arrangement. Borrowers would be able to refuse to allow their lender to flog off their loans to somebody else who does not know or care about them and views their mortgage loan as nothing more than an opportunity to make profit or trade on international markets. I see no justification for the Government's opposition to this Bill, other than that it has become a complete and utter slave to the financial markets and will do whatever the markets say.

I will finish by repeating something I said in the earlier debate. Let us contrast the Government's defence of the right of these banks to flog off people's loans to vulture funds, which will do what the hell they like to distressed mortgage borrowers, with the case of our friend, Mr. Sean Mulryan, who was in the news over the weekend. Mr. Mulryan borrowed hundreds of millions of euro and helped to bankrupt the economy, along with his other developer friends, yet the State engaged with him. The National Asset Management Agency paid him €200,000 to get his business going again. Mr. Mulryan then got himself out of NAMA with the assistance of some of the major international financial operators and is now back in control of sites in the docks, which he is flogging to the Central Bank for about €200 million.

The State engaged with Mr. Mulryan who was shown a great deal of human consideration. He was not a good faith borrower seeking to put a roof over his head. Having helped to crash the entire economy because of his greed, he is back in business and the Central Bank is to pay him €200 million to buy new premises beside the spanking new premises it has already required. Having moved from Dame Street, it will buy another new premises from Mr. Mulryan. The contrast could not be greater. That is a bit of moral hazard. The only moral hazard the Government is concerned with is the hazard that might impact on global financial speculators.

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