Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am delighted to be able to say a few words on this rushed legislation. We are closing the stable door long after the horse has bolted. The horses have been dancing around the Curragh. We saw before the financial crash the people who were visiting the tents, playing golf, attending race meetings and minding the horses. We saw where that got us. We invited these investors in. I accept that there were a number of problems at the time, however. We could not get money. Our banks were broke - or they were supposed to be. We painfully bailed them out, are bailing them out and will be bailing them out, and our grandchildren will too.

To have what is going on now unabated is shocking. I am not one to demonise every builder and developer because we need people to build houses for people to live in, but there has to be value for money and the homes have to be affordable. The builder has to make a small profit. Most builders are decent. However, then there is this carry-on with these cuckoo funds and the vulture funds. I remember the former Minister, Michael Noonan, telling us in the Dáil that the vulture funds were necessary. We are being told these cuckoo funds are necessary as well. How necessary are they, though? We needed them at the time but we got back on the road. We should be able to build the houses ourselves without having these funds making a profit. Does the Government think this legislation will work? Share prices at some of the companies involved were actually up by 2% this morning, so they are laughing all the way to the bank, literally. It is a very serious situation if they can twiddle successive Governments around on their little fingers, the lúidín, twisting and throwing them around.

We are ineffective with the banks in the legislation we pass, with the meat barons, with the insurance companies and with everything else that affects our people and their sovereign right to live out their lives with some modicum of decency and housing and liberty. We have seen those rights diminished completely in the past 13 months and the Government will diminish them again next week or the week after with another motion to go through here. We are at the behest of and we obey Europe and we obey the international funders and everyone else, but our own people? Defend them? No. I do not know how the people are so slow to see what is going on or how they do not have them all pulled and thrown out of government. It is Tweedledum or Tweedledee. The previous Government was backed up by the current Taoiseach, Deputy Micheál Martin, with confidence and supply. He is now denying he was in there, and Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are blaming each other back and forward. Now the jolly mixture includes the Greens. They will not leave us cut a clipping. They will not leave us do anything.

The price of building is going up and we cannot see the problem. It is bizarre. It is very strange. The system in this country is ineffective and unable to deal with any of these funds or vulture funds. We see the terror that is going on in the courts with the evictions, even through the pandemic, and they are still going on. Those tenants are waiting now, their backs up against the wall. Farm land and family homes are now being put up overnight on a website, sold maybe in two hours without the farmer even knowing. What did Dan Breen, Seán Treacy, Michael Collins and Pat Crowe fight for? What did they all fight for at Soloheadbeg? For this? I say "No". I cannot support this.

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