Pa Daly (Kerry, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Over the past year, 20% of households have seen mortgage repayments increase by over €3,000. Another 20% of households have seen repayments increase by more than €5,700. Mortgage interest rates rose by over 54% in the past year, while the retail banking sector has almost doubled its profits to €5 billion. This tallies with the experience of the people I spoke to this week in County Kerry. In the last year, the mortgage of one couple with two children in college has increased by €600 per month. The mortgage of another woman, who is a single parent, went from €1,330 per month to €2,000 per month with a vulture fund. This is in a county where disposable income consistently ranks below the national average, and where people are struggling with the cost of living, with fuel costs which have recently increased and with food prices. This is in a State where 30,000 people are in mortgage arrears and 78,000 mortgages are held by vulture funds, some of which are on rates as high as 10%. This, of course, was all facilitated by the Government.

We must remember two things. Despite being consistently asked, the Government has refused to introduced temporary targeted mortgage interest reliefs in order to deal with rising mortgage costs. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael supported a number of breaks for those vulture funds, supporting the sale of mortgages to vulture funds without the consent of mortgage holders, giving vulture funds an exemption from stamp duty, and then giving other tax breaks on renting properties, all the time exposing struggling mortgage holders to higher interest rates. Big breaks for bad banks. Here is what the vulture funds are doing. The vulture fund buys a mortgage of a local family of around €200,000 from a departing bank for approximately €65,000, which is about 33% of the size of the loan. Then the vulture fund raises the interest rate ten times and it links that rate to rises to the ECB rate. However, more than likely, if the fund did borrow, it borrowed at a fraction of high street rates and in reality, although it is not linked to the ECB, it passes on every single rate rise and offers no fixed rate to those struggling families. Tens of thousands of people will not be able to meet the repayments. They will eventually sell and the vulture fund will triple the money, plus interest, or if it restructures, will eventually collect more. Consumer protection authorities say that there is currently a divide-and-conquer strategy by the vulture funds. To the people, there appears to be no regulation. Many will either sell up or be forced to seek local authority help. Anger is rising among these struggling families that the Government is not regulating or assisting with mortgage interest relief. Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Green Party are increasingly out of touch with the many people who are joining the swollen ranks of the working poor and contemplating emigration.

I support this motion. The Government needs to intervene. We need action and a rebalancing in favour of struggling families and away from vulture funds. The Government needs to provide mortgage interest relief to principal residences equivalent to 30% of increased interest costs since June 2022. It needs to increase the banking levy to support households and to develop a clear plan to help those people and to reintegrate those mortgage holders with loans held by vulture funds into the mainstream mortgage market.

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