Brian Ó Domhnaill (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

If there is to be a resolution to this issue, I can assure the previous speaker that it will not be found by political point-scoring. There is a need to deal with this issue urgently.

If we take the case of Permanent TSB, the State was a 99.2% shareholder. That was reduced in 2015 to 74.92%. The State is the substantial shareholder of the organisation but it finds itself with a conflict of interest. That must come into the equation because how can the shareholder who is seeking to advance the future of the company protect the consumer at the same time? The State has to make a decision and the Minister, who is vested on behalf of the people, needs to make a call. He either stands with the people or he stands with the bank, but he cannot dine àla carteon this one. He has to come off the fence. We either stand by the people or we do not.

In terms of the problem we face today, there has not been any burden sharing whatsoever. I will take the example of a person who took out a mortgage and is now in difficulty with Permanent TSB today - say, the person took out a €200,000 mortgage over 30 years at a rate of 4% which meant the bank stood to gain approximately €140,000 over the lifetime of the mortgage, in addition to getting back the €200,000.It was gaining substantially from the mortgage on the day the agreement was signed. The persons stood to gain also but they took 100% of the risk and the bank took 0% of the risk. That is very wrong in a structural sense and it has not been addressed since the crash in 2008. There has been no sharing of the fall-out. In addition to a position where it took no risk, the bank has also obtained a taxpayer bailout, as 75% of Permanent TSB is owned by the taxpayer. That is unbelievable. One could not write this or make it up in fairyland. The financial wizards are riding roughshod over governments all over the world, including this one in Ireland. We are doing nothing about it.

We are probably too late in trying to solve this. There is the question of the 28% share of the €21 billion loan book in Permanent TSB, and it is in its current position because the bank chose not to engage with the personal insolvency mechanism of the State. It should have been dealt with in that process as the structures exist to do it. If a write-down could have been achieved, it should have been given to the borrower and not the vulture fund. We call these vulture funds but ultimately they are businesses serving shareholders and trying to make money. We cannot really blame them as these loans could have been bought by anybody in Ireland or abroad. The likelihood is the buyer will come from abroad.

The solution is for Permanent TSB not to sell its loan book but to contact each of these customers and ask them to engage with a personal insolvency practitioner. It should start a process of assessing each loan on an individual basis. The State could insist on that as a shareholder. It would also protect the rights of people living in the 4,000 buy-to-let properties as well. There is a mechanism to deal with this if we choose to do it. The danger is that this is a slippery slope; if Permanent TSB gets away with this, Bank of Ireland will do the same thing, along with KBC and the rest. They will sell residual debt as well as properties.

There is only one solution and the State and this Minister has the choice of standing with the customer. We are not in the business of running banks after all. We might have bailed them out to keep them afloat but we are not really a shareholder of that bank with the goal of making a huge profit. We are trying to hold it together because of all the people with mortgages, debt and savings in banks. We must look at this as something different from an economic equation. That is my tuppence ha'penny worth. The other Bill by Deputy John McGuinness is excellent and it was written by the Master of the High Court, Mr. Ed Honohan. It must be supported by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. This is urgent and there should be an alternative vehicle to vulture funds.