Rose Conway Walsh (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Yes, indeed. There are many questions all of us will be putting to its representatives because we all know vulture funds are not the right solution to the non-performing loans. I understand the point regarding the stability of Permanent TSB or any other bank but this is not the way to do it. There are too many questions to be asked around it. The first question is why they cannot write-down the loans of homeowners. I come across many homeowners and people with properties who have, say, €60,000 outstanding - I have sat in some of the repossession court hearings - and they have offered the banks, say, €50,000 for the loan if they can borrow it from a family member or from some other source. Why can these amounts not be accepted? It seems to be a case of shutting the door completely on giving an opportunity to those who have been sold the property, and sometimes recklessly. Why can we not give the same write-downs to those people? We need to see a comparative analysis on this. For the bank that has the loan book and the bundles as they are, what would the difference be financially for it to give a write-down on those loans and allow some of the homeowners and business owners to buy out the loans instead of selling them off to foreign vulture funds, which operate in an abyss and certainly do not come under the remit of the regulations in this country?

As was said, and I agree with Senator Norris on this, the vulture funds do what it says on the tin. We cannot be giving out about them because that is exactly what they are - vultures. That is what they are set up to do, namely, to make as much as they possibly can in the shortest period. When we engaged with vulture funds in the first instance, and when the Government thought it was a great idea to have them as part of the solution for the banks and our financial system, it should have thought further down the road as to how exactly they were going to operate.

I want to know who makes the decision about what is a performing and a non-performing loan. What are the criteria used? Who makes it up? Is it approved by Government as to what a bank can consider to be a performing and a non-performing loan? We have never seen that. Hiding behind confidentiality, financial sensitivity and so on is nonsense, particularly in respect of some of these straightforward questions, such as whether a loan is considered to be non-performing if it is not paid back over a number of months or whatever. Within these bundles, there needs to be further analysis because I am aware that what I would consider to be perfectly performing loans have been bought by these funds and within two to three weeks the vulture funds appear to say, "No, we are closing you down". What is very serious is that this happens often in circumstances where the business being bought is in competition with a business the vulture funds already owns.

The Minister of State said that timely and complete information needs to be given to the borrowers. Does he mean timely in terms of before the loans are sold off? What are we saying about complete information? We need to know that also. All these vulture funds will say that they are adhering to the code of conduct and so on, but they need to be told exactly what to do, as do the banks. We know from the finance committee that the banks are trained within an inch of their lives to present and not to answer the questions to which people need answers.

Regarding the vulture funds being asked to come before the finance committee several times, we know they have worn a path in and out of the Department of Finance. They have access to key personnel within that Department. I want to know who was at those meetings, what was said at them, if records are being kept of them and so on. They do not have to appear before the finance committee because they have access through the back door. That must stop, but we have to be able to see the information on all of that.

My colleague, Deputy Pearse Doherty, tabled an amendment to the 2015 legislation, to which Minister of State referred, which would have regulated the actual holder of the credit and not the credit servicer, but the Fine Gael Party and the Labour Party refused to support it. That is what makes me very annoyed about what is happening today. Those parties refused to support it, and the Fianna Fáil members did not even turn up for the vote.