Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

As we look back and ask ourselves the quite legitimate questions Deputy Boyd Barrett has raised, we may come up with a different answer to the raison d'êtreused at the time, that is, that investment companies had to be invited into the State in order to generate movement in the banking sector. There was nobody to whom people could apply to borrow. There was no money in the system. The system was broken. It was stalled in the water and withering on the vine. That, in a business context, as members will know readily, cannot prevail. We were getting to a situation, which I saw happening in some countries, in which the ATMs had nothing to offer, which was a frightening thought. That is the stage at which it comes home to the individual householder and the person who quite rightly raises such questions.

The question as to whether or not these companies have outlived their usefulness is a different issue, but there are two very different situations. There is the one that prevailed at the time, when there was no money in the country, no movement in financial circles and property values of all descriptions were on the bottom and going down fast. There were some cases in which properties were devalued by as much as 90% of the original value. I saw them on the market. That could not continue. If it had remained that way for a while longer, the natural follow-up would have been emigration re-accelerated at a scale never known before.

There were, therefore, reasons at that stage to invite in the financial companies and financial investors, now known as vulture funds. I do not like vulture funds and I do not like some of the things they do. I have had to deal with them on behalf of constituents, which I will continue to do, hopefully with reasonably good effect. However, we need to know what happened at the time. There is a historical version of this that has to be borne in mind when absorbing the information now available in the ether and the marketplace. By all means, we have a right to ask questions now about these companies' raison d'être, and we are all aware of cases in which the impaired loans have been sold on to financial companies. Financial investment companies are now in the business of disposing of them and taking them over. I raised this question repeatedly when nobody else in the House was raising it, long before the question was asked as to whether and to what extent unregulated third parties would come under the jurisdiction of the Central Bank. They were not originally under its jurisdiction and, to my mind, they are only partially under it now.

The fact remains it is legitimate to raise the question as to how we deal with this now. It falls on us as public representatives to decide how we should react. I acknowledge the Opposition's point of view. I would probably do the same myself, although I have my doubts about it. The Government gets the blame for everything from the weather to the lack of moonlight, so it is covered in respect of both day and night. Nevertheless, we need to examine this in a somewhat different light because circumstances are different. This is about large investment companies making a massive profit from selling somebody's property, that is, somebody's misery. We all have appalling stories to tell about dealing with the banks, which have been regulated over the past eight or ten years but the problems have not subsided with the passage of time. In the past week, I have had to deal with a number of cases and next week I will deal with a further number of cases. The situation has become pressing from the point of view of people who took out mortgages in good faith and fell by the wayside because of the domino effect. Once the crash came, it came in its totality. Nobody was spared from it, and even ten, 12 or 14 years later, they are still suffering. The ultimate suffering will now take place because they are in danger of being made homeless all together.