Paul Bradford (Fine Gael)

I support what Senator MacSharry said about the crisis in house repossessions. It will be one of the major political and social problems in the coming 12 months. I read documentation from the Senator and from Senator Butler, but we need an urgent debate with the appropriate Minister on how it intends to deal with the growing number of repossessions. We are all meeting constituents whose houses are at grave risk. I had the unfortunate occasion to meet with two such couples on the same day. One couple's house is on the verge of being repossessed, while the second couple were just about to hand back their house to the financial agency and apply for a local authority house. These problems will become commonplace. At a time when Senator Regan and others are discussing the NAMA plan before the European Commission, we need a similar kind of project to deal with the tens of thousands of householders who are genuinely worried that their houses will be repossessed. That needs an urgent debate.

I support the hopes expressed by my colleagues that there will be progress in Northern Ireland in the very near future. Notwithstanding our desire for good news at an early stage, we must try to keep things in perspective. It is only in the last ten or 15 years that we have had a genuine peace and political process in place. When we contrast that with the generations of strife, trouble, mayhem and murder, then we have to appreciate that we cannot get permanent overnight solutions to a problem that stretches back along the ages. There is a line by Yeats about peace dropping slow and politics also drops slowly in Northern Ireland. Patience is required. Gamesmanship is going on and we must recognise that. Our desire must be that policing, justice and broader problems are resolved in the immediate future. We must try to see the bigger picture. For 15 or 20 years in the Oireachtas every time we spoke about Northern Ireland we were discussing the previous night's atrocity. At least we are now talking about the broader picture. There is hope and with a little patience and understanding, we will see progress in the near future.