Seanad debates

Tuesday, 7 October 2014

3:15 pm

Photo of Sean BarrettSean Barrett (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the announcement this afternoon by the Central Bank that it will be insisting upon a 20% deposit on residential house purchases and the maximum loan being limited to 3.5 times income. We proposed that in No. 33 on the Order Paper in the spring of 2012. It has been on the Order Paper for over two and a half years. I am delighted that it has finally reached the echelons of the Central Bank because it is the rational thing to do. I also suggest that this must apply to commercial property because in the madness of the Celtic tiger property boom, commercial property such as the veterinary site not many miles away was even worse than what was done by the banks in the domestic sector.

I also wish to express the sympathies of the House to the Reverend Colin McKibben, the minister of Convoy Presbyterian Church, which was attacked by fire bombers last Friday. I commend the local priest, Fr. Phillip Kemmy, for expressing his sympathy. The Orange Hall in Convoy was also destroyed. When the Orange Order visited here through the invitation of the Leader and the Cathaoirleach, it praised the former Minister, Deputy Ó Cuív, for a previous programme of restoring Orange Order properties which had been burned out in the Border counties. This is something we do not want to go back to and I condemn that burning unreservedly.

What the former Minister of State, Deputy O'Dowd, now describes as the disaster of Irish Water was forecast perfectly on these benches. We asked him to provide for consumer representation. The former Minister of State called for the introduction of new board members with a consumer advocacy background. The Ombudsman has said this week that nobody has explained why statutory and independent redress was removed and that there was no consultation with his office or the public. We have the recruitment of staff without open competition, the long-standing statement by Professor John Fitzgerald that this organisation should have 1,700 staff, not 4,300, and a watchdog where 59 staff were paid €1 million in bonuses. We badly need a debate on water in this country because this House was right. All our amendments should have been accepted by the former Minister of State. I am sorry he is now in the political wilderness but he did have the way to deal with the problem if he had accepted what we said at the time.

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