Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank all of the speakers who spoke on this motion today. Many of them mentioned that this is the third time we have had a motion of this nature before the House. Sinn Féin will continue to campaign and to put forward proposals that will provide relief for hard-pressed workers and families in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis. We are very conscious that there is a portion of workers and people out there who are suffering as a result of different inflationary costs, whether it is food, energy, petrol or diesel. It would be remiss of me not to outline the shameful decision taken by Government on 1 September to increase the price of diesel and petrol. It is planning to do so again on 11 October and again on 31 October. Hopefully it will see sense and not proceed with those increases pushing petrol and diesel close to €2 a litre if not more.

There are many pressures pressing down on families but the largest that many families have seen is the cost of maintaining a roof over their head in terms of mortgage interest. The Central Bank figures speak very clearly. There are more than 700,000 people who pay their mortgages in this State, and 20% of them will have seen an increase of €5,700 in the cost of servicing their mortgage compared to last year. That is an increase of €5,700 that hundreds of thousands of people will have seen. What has the Government done? Nothing. It has washed its hands of it, buried its head in the sand and told them to paddle their own canoe. It has come up with nothing. Last year I stood in this very spot and said that this is my proposal - if the Government does not like it, that is fine, it can come up with its own proposal. There are many ways to cut and slice this. We can make it more targeted. We can look at the allowances, look at the caps and do many things. The Government could at least come to the table with something. All of the months have passed and the Government has come up empty-handed.

In the meantime, month after month the interest rates have been increasing automatically for tracker mortgages. In the next number of days, households across the State are going to get the tenth letter since July of last year indicating that their mortgage has increased. That is ten interest rate rises for those people. I refer to the loans that the Ministers across here allowed to be sold to the vulture funds, and clapped the banks while they were doing it and would not prevent it from happening. Many people with those loans are paying 8%, 9% and 10% in interest rates now in the hands of the vulture funds and the Government has done nothing.

The first budget that Fine Gael introduced in 2012 extended mortgage interest relief. The level available at the time was 30%. It was possible to claim up to €20,000 relief. People could benefit to the tune of €6,000 in terms of mortgage interest relief. The ECB rate at the time was 0.75% and it is 4.5% today. The Minister who is in charge of all of this, Deputy Michael McGrath, in 2016 said that in the 2016 general election Fianna Fáil was the only party of which he was aware that campaigned on the basis that mortgage interest relief would be retained and provided for in budgetary and fiscal projections make at the time. He said he would have loved to see it retained at a rate of 100% but that this was the best they could negotiate. That was him talking about negotiating with Fine Gael to extend it for a couple of years. Does the Minister of State know what the interest rate was in this State in 2016 when the current Minister for Finance, Deputy Michael McGrath, said he would love to have it extended at 100%? It was zero. At a time of interest rates of zero, in Fianna Fáil's time, and of 0.75% in Fine Gael's time, the parties opposite had no problem introducing mortgage interest relief that benefitted people to the tune of thousands of euro.

We are talking now in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis when interest rates at ECB level have never been as high, ever, and Sinn Féin is proposing to take a targeted measure that only seeks to take on 30% of the increased interest and a maximum cap of €1,500. This is what is needed. Some day hopefully Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil will wake up and understand where ordinary people are at. They are so out of touch it is unbelievable. They cannot understand that people need support at this time during this cost-of-living crisis.

See this speech in context