Alan Shatter (Dublin South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Senator Byrne should be less excitable about this. If only he showed that level of excitement about seven or eight years ago, when his party was destroying the country, I would be more impressed. It does not matter what figure I put in, no one will be happy. This type of provision generally does not exist in insolvency legislation in other countries. People in debt are stressed and in difficulty and leading difficult lives. I hope not all of them are in the circumstances the Senator seeks to portray. Fortunately, they are not all people whose marriages have broken down. We should not get carried away with ourselves on this issue.

This concerns debt relief notices. Let us remember what it does. It applies to people of modest backgrounds, with limited income and limited resources. We cannot have a provision that provides, without any financial limits, that some open-ended item of jewellery of ceremonial significance is exempt from being of relevance to their debts in circumstances in which the application is that the person holds up to ¤20,000 debt and that the creditors should receive nothing. The debt relief notice gives people a free pass three years later. They are free of all their debts and their creditors are left carrying them. I hope they will fruitfully get on with their lives and will not find themselves in debt again. In the debt relief notice provisions, in the context of assessing the value of assets, we give details on a range of items that are excluded and will not be taken into account. The total value of these is ¤6,000 but we cannot keep on constructing additional bricks to increase the value of assets. At some point we get to a position where it is grossly unfair to creditors owed modest sums of money that individuals who owe them money can retain assets of value.

I keep wanting to remind people that, when it comes to debt relief notices, we are not talking about banks who lent ¤500,000 to people to purchase houses currently worth ¤200,000. We are talking, by and large, about people who have run up credit card debt and money owed to credit unions, local shops and local tradespeople. It may be that the milkman has been delivering milk for a number of weeks, has not been paid, is owed ¤200 or ¤300 and the person is saying there will be no payment. Let us be realistic about this.

In the context of producing a proposal and with regard to an item of family significance, it cannot be an item of substantial value. Everyone can work out that what is substantial to one person is insubstantial to another but we are dealing with modest circumstances. This is a provision that generally does not exist in other jurisdictions and if we propose an amendment, someone else will propose that the value should be higher. In dealing with Senator Byrne's colleagues in the Dáil, there was a dialogue about something to the value of ¤400 or ¤500. The Deputies did the same thing by tabling an amendment with no value attached to it. I said that in no circumstances could this be accepted. We will try to deal with this is a commonsense way.

All of us - I include myself - have enormous sympathy for individuals caught in a debt spiral while leading difficult lives. Let us not forget that this legislation is not about persecuting them as some Members of the Houses of the Oireachtas would like to portray it. The way this was dealt with by the media and by some Members of the other House was quite bizarre. The legislation is providing debt amelioration for people who have run up debts. This is an alternative to bankruptcy and not everyone who has run up debt is in debt because of unfortunate circumstances over which they had no control. Significant numbers of people are in debt because they lived as if there was no tomorrow. No matter how high their incomes, they spent every last penny. People get into debt because they gamble or because they have a drug addiction. Where there is addiction, it is another issue to be addressed but there are a series of reasons people get into debt. There are innocent creditors whose businesses collapse and whose jobs are lost because those who owe them money do not pay. Jobs are lost in this country every day because small businesses that have given credit to or supplied goods to people suddenly find the people who owe money will not pay. Not everyone in debt is meritorious. Their circumstances may be sad but not everyone is innocent and meritorious. In order to maintain balance in this debate, some people are in debt because of the manner in which they conduct their lives. Others are not in debt because there were a great deal more responsible.

I do not want this portrayed as an attack on people in debt. Too many people are in debt through no fault of their own and through unfortunate circumstances that they could never have anticipated, which is a great tragedy of the economic and fiscal difficulties into which this country was taken by the time we got to 2008. That is a great tragedy and it has had an impact on tens of thousands of people who never in their lives anticipated they would find themselves in financial difficulty. Far too many people are in this category. Let us not be hypocritical and over-excited about this issue in the context of responsibility that rests within Senator Byrne's party for where we now find ourselves and the reason we need this legislation. It is to provide mechanisms to facilitate people in financial difficulties to work their way through their debts without going into bankruptcy and, more important, in the context of the personal insolvency arrangement, without losing their homes. Such people would never have anticipated finding themselves in difficulty when they purchased their homes in the early 2000s.