Pat Casey (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The Minister is welcome. I also welcome my good friend, Gail Dunne. We have competed and soldiered in elections together, but through all that time we have always remained good friends. That is very important in politics today.

When submitting the three recommendations, I knew they would probably be ruled out of order, but I wished to continue my focus on what I believe is a certain inequality in relation to the operation of the help-to-buy scheme. We all know the importance of the help-to-buy scheme, which has assisted more than 42 families to now own their own homes. The advent of the first-home scheme last year has now given another cohort of families an opportunity to own their own home, when they could probably never have aspired to do so. Yet, across my work in both these sections and in dealing with the public, I have come across a number of live cases, and this continues to happen on a weekly basis, where the mortgage people can receive is less than the 70% that is allowable under the help-to-buy scheme. They need the assistance of the first-home scheme to allow them to purchase that house.

My question is always about how this cohort of people probably need this intervention more than some of the others. We can refer to reports, such as the Mazars report, and the issue of the “deadweight”.The people who require the first-home and help-to-buy schemes are not deadweight. That those people can only get a mortgage to 67%, 68% or 69% means they are ruled out and the aspiration to own their own home is ruled out.

The Minister has referred to macroprudential rules in this regard. The first two recommendations I proposed intended to see if I could incorporate with the first-home scheme a definition for the service charge as similar to interest and define funds received from the first-home scheme as similar to a loan from a bank. Those recommendations have been ruled out of order.

This goes back to the fundamental principle and the question of what is different about these people compared with somebody who can get a mortgage in excess of 70% of the value of the home. Why are these people being excluded? They have sweated everything they can sweat. They have got the maximum mortgage possible. They have used whatever savings they can and still have a shortfall, a gap, for which the first-home scheme intervenes to provide the money. That gap should be taken into account in the loan-to-debt ratio. That was the purpose of my proposed recommendations.

My final recommendation related to reducing that 70% limit to 60%. That was proposed in case the first two of my recommendations did not get through. The proposal would ensure that another cohort of people could qualify for the help-to-buy scheme.

I will continue to work on this issue because I believe it is right to do so. It is right for the people who need it. A wider debate is going on in the Departments of Finance and housing about how the help-to-buy and first-home schemes interact and what their interactions will look like in the future. In the meantime, I know 15 families who have lost the aspiration of owning their own homes because their mortgage percentage fell between 65% and 69%. That is unfair and unequal, particularly when we talk about the deadweight associated with the help-to-buy scheme. I thank the Minister for his work on this issue. I appreciate it.