Marie Louise O'Donnell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I spent last night reading Mr. Honohan's report from the Central Bank on the 20% to be imposed in terms of loan-to-value and loan-to-income requirements and I think it is a great example of obfuscation. It is endemic and extraordinary because nowhere in the document, which all Members should read, does it actually state that the banks are at fault. We are all at fault but they are not necessarily at fault. There is reference to "too lax mortgage credit standards" when there were in fact no mortgage level standards in the banks. We allegedly destabilised the economy, when the banks did it singlehandedly. They drove up the profits. Every sale they made generated commission. They did not know their jobs, they did not know the internal workings of their jobs, they did not know the ethics of their jobs, or the morality of their jobs. They had no competence, they had no ability, and now they are trying to blame us, as if we are the only people in the business.

The banks were inextricably linked to the housing market. They created it, it was their baby. Some of them are still in the job, still doing the same thing. What have they learned? They have learned nothing. This question is raised in the document, but it is not answered. They are still driving up the prices, they are still driving up the interest rates and they are still crucifying Mr. Ordinary. As someone from Fianna Fáil mentioned yesterday, we do not even have a human being to talk to when we go in the door of the bank. They talked about loan-to-value and loan-to-income ratios but my question is where Mr. Ordinary will get 20% of the value of the property. It is not the deposit that crucifies people, it is the interest rates that do so. People are incapable of paying them back. Mr. Honohan says that the loans issued near the peak of the cycle led to large numbers of borrowers in negative equity once housing prices turned, which is a well-documented cause of mortgage defaults. Here is my documented cause - the banks lent money like circus clowns and they made commission on every single penny they lent. That is why we had a housing bubble. I would also like to ask Mr. Honohan why he did not do this in any other year since 2008.

Before I finish, let me get to the best example of banking alliteration in the document, on page 30. It reads: "The loosening of lending standards played a large part in fuelling the Irish property boom." That is what Mr. Honohan calls it. Here is my better example of alliteration - "gross greed and no banking governance". Banks constitute the most incompetent, the most immoral and the most powerfully useless institutions in the country. I despair that I have to go into them because I have nobody to speak to, but I must go in because my salary is paid through the banking system as I cannot get it in cash. We need serious debate in the Seanad about the Irish banking system and the obfuscation that goes on in documents like this, blaming the Irish people, who are just the butt of their incompetence. I call on the Minister for Finance to come in here and explain this extraordinary, endemic obfuscation of the real reasons behind the economic collapse. If one cannot tell oneself the real reason for the problem, then one will never learn what the real reason for the problem is, which is the banks' greed, greed and more greed.