Rose Conway Walsh (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Bill and Sinn Féin will facilitate its passage through all Stages in the House. It goes some way towards addressing the concerns of all affected homeowners regarding who is regulated.

Since the Bill was introduced back in March of this year, many more mortgages have been sold to vultures. This issue goes back four years when the first raft of Irish Bank Resolution Corporation, IBRC, mortgage holders learned that their mortgages had been sold to vultures. We all knew what the solution was back then.

The owners of the debt themselves needed to be regulated, not the middlemen or the credit servicing firms. The previous Government promised legislation, but after heavy lobbying by the vultures, it chose only to regulate the middlemen. We then found out that ten of these credit servicing firms or middlemen did not go through with the applications, and operated under a transitional scheme. Sinn Féin proposed an amendment to that 2015 legislation, which called for the regulation of the debt owners and that is what we still call for today.

My colleague, Deputy Pearse Doherty, introduced legislation last year which went as far as holding the vultures themselves to account. If they stepped out of line, the Central Bank could hold them to account and, ultimately, prosecute them as opposed to going after the middlemen. It is, therefore, obvious that what homeowners demanded way back in 2015 was not been delivered by the then Labour and Fine Gael Government or the current coalition of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil.