Aideen Hayden (Labour) | Oireachtas source

Today the Irish Banking Federation is having a conference entitled Restoring Confidence and Building Trust which it says will be a wideranging debate between, among others, academics, policy makers and so forth, and including key stakeholders. Ironically, however, there is no speaker listed who will represent distressed mortgage holders. I heard the comments of Fiona Muldoon, director of credit institutions and insurance provision in the Central Bank, who was, to put it mildly, very critical of the role of the banks and their actions in dealing with distressed mortgages. She described them - I paraphrase - as behaving like teenagers in their relationship with the Central Bank and the regulator. She did not put too fine a tooth in it.

I realise this debate has been called for on a number of occasions but it is really high time we had the Minister for Finance in the Chamber to explain to us exactly what progress has been made in dealing with the situation of distressed mortgage holders. The Central Bank gave some preliminary figures today which show that, particularly in the wider area of buy-to-let mortgages which has not really come into the public domain, the situation is deteriorating rapidly. The bottom line is that the banking sector in this country, as Ms Muldoon, again, pointed out, has been kicking the can, waiting for some magic solution such as house prices beginning to rise once more, the level of employment rising dramatically by 20%, or whatever it may be. All the while, every day of the week, there are distressed mortgage holders in this country who are in deeply disastrous situations.

I ask the Leader to move the calling of that debate up the agenda.