Marc MacSharry (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to contribute to the debate. The loophole that is being filled today, while the anomaly needs to be addressed, puts the final tool into the shade of the banks in terms of making them all powerful in pursuit of their debts. In 2009 we were in Government when I first started to lobby on this issue in the north west and set up the Prevention of Family Home Repossessions Group. People laughed at what we predicted would be a huge crisis and so it is. Some of the media covered this point at the weekend. Senator Sean D. Barrett often used the phrase "a metaphorical backstairs" that was available exclusively for the use of the banks into the Department of Finance.

The recommendations of the Prevention of Family Home Repossessions Group eventually grew into the Family Home Bill. The then Minister, the late Brian Lenihan, believed in those points of view, that before an order for repossession could be granted the bank would have to convince the court of the quality of the original underwriting in the application, that a full range of alternatives was considered by the bank, including, split mortgages, extending the mortgage up to 20 years, intergenerational mortgages and a number of other measures of which the House is well aware, having listened to me in recent years. The then Minister's concern was that his officials advised that one had to be conscious of the market and what the market might think of this and, as a result, the best the Minister could do at the time was to get me to make a presentation to the then Hugh Cooney expert group on mortgage arrears and personal debt.

We also had the Keane group on mortgage arrears, others reviews, a Cabinet subcommittee and a code of conduct, which was useless. Indeed, the Minister of State, Deputy Brian Hayes, representing the Minister, said when the Family Home Bill was before the House on 11 July 2011 that the code of conduct on mortgage arrears was working exceptionally well. There was no problem. He also questioned the constitutionality of the Bill, which is the default position for Ministers when they do not want to accept a Private Members' Bill. We now have a renewed code of conduct, on which Senator Aideen Hayden and I are on the same page, which gives complete power to the banks. As Deputy Joe Higgins put it in the other House, the fox is now firmly in control of the hen house, which makes no sense whatsoever.

In normal trading conditions and if we were considering normal economics and its effects on society, whether one is neoclassical or Keynesian, or whatever aspect one wants to take, I would say that perhaps we have to let repossessions take place. I have heard others refer to advice that repossessions have to take place and we need to get on with it, in order that we can find the floor and move on. If this was in a normal scenario, I would say perhaps but we are not in a normal scenario. There is no school of economics in any trading conditions that would advise guaranteeing the entire banking system to save the euro, to pay back the bondholders in Germany and France. There is no economics book that will advise one to do that. For good or for bad, we did it. Many of us would feel there was no other option at the time. If Fine Gael was in power it would have had no choice but to do the same; even the mighty Sinn Féin may have had to do the same, and probably would have done it. We will never know.