Inné, d'fhógair an Rialtas an plean úr ó thaobh dul i ngleic le cruachás na morgáistí. I ndiaidh dhá bhliain gan aon rud a dhéanamh, nuair atá dúblú tagtha ar méid na ndaoine atá in ríaráistí morgáiste 90 lá nó níos mó, feictear dúinn go bhfuil an plean sin lochtach san dóigh céanna a bhí na pleananna roimhe sin, mar go bhfuil an Rialtas ag fágáil na sonraí suas ag na bainc arís.

Yesterday the Government announced its latest plan in response to the mortgage crisis. After two years of doing nothing and seeing the numbers in arrears double during its term the Government's announcement has repeated the mistakes of the past. Has the Government not learned the lesson that the banks will do at best the bare minimum and at worst exacerbate the mortgage crisis? All the evidence tells us that the banks cannot be trusted to address the mortgage crisis with which tens of thousands of families across the State are grappling. We have only to look at what the banks have been doing, hiking up interest rates and failing to provide debt write-downs. Over half of those in restructured mortgages have slipped into arrears.

Point of order.

There is no point of order.

This is not the first time that the Government, and indeed the previous Government, have brought forward a plan to deal with the mortgage crisis. When Deputy Martin's party was kicked out of office there were 120,000 families in mortgage distress. Every plan that the previous Administration and this one have brought forward has failed because it has left the decision up to the banks. The Minister knows that 185,000 families are in mortgage distress and that excludes the buy-to-let sector. His plan has left these families at the mercy of the banks once again. If he looks at the figures, which deal only with those in arrears of 90 days or more by the end of this year the majority of those 185,000 families will not even be offered a sustainable compromise or solution.

Why has the Minister not learned the lessons of the past? Why has he not taken the veto away from the bank? Does he not realise that the bank will not do what is required? The threat in respect of capital sanctions is not enough. The Minister knows that the stress test tested those banks and provided the capital to allow for the write-down to the current market value of the property. That is the stick the Minister is using against the banks. The 185,000 families were waiting for an immediate solution not some long-fingering that left it up to the banks to decide how best to resolve their mortgages.

What they need is some transparency, not a veil of secrecy leaving it up to the banks to pick one person off the other depending on what is there. Yesterday, the Minister was not-----

The Deputy is over time.

-----prescriptive about the solutions that were offered. He spoke about debt write-downs but he has not firmly placed it as an option for the banks. Why has the Minister not considered taking the veto off the banks and establishing an independent agency that could compel the banks to accept solutions which they have so far not being willing to accept?

Does the Deputy want us to buy a bank?

What about Northern Bank?

We could blow it up.

Ar an gcéad dul síos ba mhaith liom mo bhuíochas a ghabháil leis an Teachta as ucht seo a lua arís. Maidir leis na freagraí a thugamar inné, níl an plean lochtach ar chor ar bith. Beidh réiteach ar fáil do a lán clann timpeall na tíre nuair a bhéas an plean curtha i bhfeidhm.

There is no flaw in what was put out yesterday. Solutions will be offered to families. It was slow and I have expressed impatience previously about the tardiness of the banks in implementing solutions. Of course, they had ready-made solutions because we entered a situation where the law was inadequate. The Minister for Justice and Equality had to bring in an enormous and complex Bill on personal insolvency. That has been passed and the director of the personal insolvency agency has been appointed. He is scheduled to make a statement at the end of this month. He will be employing personal insolvency practitioners, affectionately known as PIPs, who will intervene between lenders and borrowers to protect the interests of the borrower when arrangements are made.

Then there is a range of solutions cascading down from interest-only arrangements right through to write-downs. We all know from clinic work that some people are just tricking around with repayment schedules, extending maturities or even splitting mortgages. There is a group of people for whom write-down is the only solution. However, it will have to be done on a case-by-case basis.

There are people who would like if we announced some kind of discount. That is not going to happen. There will not be any kind of across-the-board write-down for people who can pay but who are not paying. It will be on a case-by-case basis and this is the way it will be adjudicated.

Hear, hear.

Hear, hear.

Only developers and speculators get discounts.

Some of them even got 50% write-downs.

On the issue of the independent agency, first, there will be a director of the personal insolvency agency who will implement the provisions of the personal insolvency Act with the personal insolvency practitioners. He is independent under the law passed by this House. The driver of this will be the Central Bank which is independent under Statute and the Constitution. It has co-operated with us in setting out the targets. It will take ownership of setting the targets for completed arrangements which are sustainable. It will make those announcements in the summer time.

We accepted some of the ideas the Deputy brought forward in debates. It is important there would be an independent approach. We have it through the director of the personal insolvency agency and the Central Bank exercising its independent function to deal with this. I hope with this we can arrive at a solution.

However, I am not underplaying the difficulties of which we all aware. It is a quantifiable difficulty. I met the boards of all the banks the week before last. In the course of my conservation with the board of AIB, one of the directors asked me if I realised the average arrears in AIB across 35,000 mortgages comes to €13,000. That means half of them are below that and half of them are above that. If the arrears are of that order, then there should be readily available solutions for quite a lot of people to resolve their problems. Others will have more difficulty but we will work systematically through it. The Central Bank will drive it.

The Government has taken a hands-off approach to this. The targets will be set by the Central Bank, which is independent, and will be supervised by it. However, the Central Bank cannot compel a bank to prescribe a set of options. The only action the Central Bank can take in the plan announced by the Minister yesterday is to force the banks to make provisions against the losses of the impaired mortgages.

On non-Irish banks.

The banks have already been recapitalised to do that, so it is not a significant threat.

Will the Minister accept that at the core of the mortgage crisis is the issue that people's incomes have dropped substantially? Some of this has happened because of unemployment. For others, it is because the Government's budgetary polices have picked their pockets of disposable income. Will the Minister accept that each year his budgetary polices are making the mortgage crisis worse? Taking people's disposable income means a reduction in the money they would spend in the domestic economy and how much they can pay on their mortgages.

One only has to look at some of the measures the Minister introduced. There have been increases in motor tax and the duty on alcohol and cigarettes. The new family home tax will crucify people. There will be water charges coming down the line. All of these are adding fuel to the fire.

Diesel.

We know the Government has targeted children and families through cutting child benefit, taxing maternity benefit and increasing college fees.

Where is the question?

Thank you, Deputy.

All these budgetary measures have reduced people's ability to pay their mortgages. This needs to be dealt with in a holistic fashion. The banks need to be forced to do the right thing. I have documents, which I released last week, which show what the banks are doing to the buy-to-let sector. The banks are telling borrowers that if they speak about arrangements or even state that they are in discussions with the banks, they will be liable for any losses the banks will incur.

The Deputy must conclude.

There is no transparency in the Minister's approach to mortgage resolutions. Will he accept that his budgetary position of picking the pockets of people struggling to pay their mortgages is making the crisis worse?

The main thrust of Deputy Pearse Doherty's first intervention was that there should be an independent agency to look after these matters and that this was part of Sinn Féin's policy proposed earlier in the year. Now he is accusing me of having a hands-off approach. If there is to be an independent agency, then it must be independent. The independent agency in this case is the Central Bank, which is very involved in this process.

Yet, it cannot do anything.

The Deputy cannot have it both ways on this.

It is not independent agency, it is just supervisory. What we called for was an independent credit agency. The Minister should not misquote me.

The Minister has the floor.

The Deputy advocated the establishment of an independent agency. When I told him that was what would happen, he said we were hands-off in the Department of Finance and that was no good.

The Central Bank is a supervisory agency.

The Deputy cannot have it both ways. There has to be some logic to his policy positions.

There is not.

He is correct in linking the issue of impaired mortgages to unemployment. Many people have linked it to negative equity and all sorts of other things. If one looks at it properly, the people with impaired mortgages are by and large unemployed. It is because of unemployment that we have this crisis. If we do not introduce the measures we have in the budget and if we do not get the deficit down, we will not repair this economy and, subsequently, we will have more unemployed people. The Deputy might not like the solutions but they are solutions. We are systematically working to get the economy growing again. It is growing faster than anywhere else in Europe, bar Estonia, and we will continue doing that.

The jobs strategy is to get people back to work. Much of this is intractable. It is difficult to find a job elsewhere for someone who worked on a building site for 20 years, no matter what retraining schemes one introduces. The Deputy's solution, however, is to pile deficit on deficit and debt on debt.

It is not about taxing the unemployed.

Order.

That approach would result in more people being unemployed and more impaired mortgages.