Eugene Murphy (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I fully support Senator Clonan and will support the idea of a debate on carers and people who look after those who are vulnerable. That is important. In the context of all that has been revealed in recent times, we need to have a debate.

While I understand people might have issues relating to migrants and developing centres, I absolutely deplore and abhor violence and people who are trying to stir up trouble. That is the last thing we want. We should all be resolute on that in this Chamber. By all means, we take on board the comments and concerns of people. However, some of the outrageous lies going out in social media are very concerning.

I want to use most of my time to speak about increasing interest rates. It now looks like we will have a further increase in mortgage rates. While I acknowledge the work done by the present Government, the Minister for Finance and indeed the former Minister for Finance, Deputy Donohoe, we have managed to get to a place where the average mortgage rate here is 2.8%, which is the third lowest now in Europe. We have gone from being almost at the top down to 2.8%, which is the third best in Europe.

My concern is about people who are on 6% and 7% mortgage rates, basically from vulture funds. Those people are in trouble already and I am concerned about them. There are a serious number of them. I heard the Minister for Finance speak about this and he is in talks with the Central Bank. I ask that we would agree to write to the Central Bank to express our concern on behalf of those people. The last thing we want is people in trouble with mortgages. It brings huge stress on families and children. It is a serious issue and I would like to see us address it. Perhaps we could get agreement from everybody that we would write to the Central Bank expressing our deep concern about that very high interest rate of up to 7% being charged by some vulture funds.