Thousands of Irish families are facing eviction. Ulster Bank alone has 4,700 repossession cases before the courts.

Please allow the Deputy make his point. If you are leaving the Chamber, you should leave quietly. You are in the Houses of Parliament, so please remember that.

At Clonmel court last Thursday, there were 30 such repossession cases and the same is happening in every courthouse right across this country. At the same time, thousands of Irish homes have been sold to foreign landlords. The Irish Nationwide Building Society non-performing loan book is being sold at knock down prices to American vulture capitalists Loan Star and Oakland Capital. What have they immediately done? Their first action was to appoint Pepper of Australia as debt payment enforcers. The holders of these mortgages, who are the home owners, were not even allowed to bid for them. At the same time, the Government is allowing senior bankers to give each other and other rich friends huge secret write-downs using money borrowed by the State and supplied to the banks, when unemployed and low-income families who owe as little as €20,000 on their homes are being bullied out of their homes or they are being repossessed. The banks have sole discretion on write-downs using State supplied money.

What did the vultures pay for the former Irish Nationwide Building Society loan book? Will the Taoiseach bring forward immediately legislation to protect these and other mortgage holders from arbitrary interest rate increases and repossessions? Will he bring forward legislation to bring complete transparency to the write-down process? Will the Government ban confidentiality clauses in that process? Finally, will the Government put in place fair, legally enforceable criteria for that write-down process?

The Government could get that done in two days.

We have made it perfectly clear that there is no strategy in place to force or encourage possessions of people's family homes. In fact, the Government's approach to mortgage arrears and mortgage distress over the past two and a half years has involved putting in place a suite of opportunities for borrowers and lenders to work out sustainable solutions in each of these cases. That is why the personal insolvency legislation was introduced and other facilities were brought into operation. I am glad to say these measures are having an impact on significant numbers of people. This is not happening as quickly as we would like, and is not helping as many people as we would like, but it is happening. A number of people just will not engage with the lender in the first place. Those cases are solvable-----

They are not solvable.

In most cases, they are solvable if people are prepared to work out a solution and a conclusion.

As Members are aware, individual banks have agreed a number of write-offs in the recent past. These agreements have received quite a deal of publicity. If Deputy Healy wants to get these details from the Minister for Finance, I suggest he submit a request to the Ceann Comhairle to raise this matter on Topical Issues. The overall position is that house repossessions should be the very end of the line.

The majority of house repossessions have taken place by voluntary consent or voluntary offering from the people involved. While there are occasional increases in the number of mortgages in distress or in arrears of more than 90 days, they are being worked out as time goes on. We want the target set for the banks by the Central Bank and the Government - that sustainable workable solutions should be offered by the end of the year to every mortgage holder in distress or in arrears - to be achieved. The policy here is that no instruction for house repossessions has been given. It should be a very last resort. In some of the cases I have read about, it was a very last resort. The banks involved made substantial write-downs, which allowed people to continue to live in their own houses and contribute to their local areas, etc.

As the leader of this country, the Taoiseach is responsible for what is happening in relation to repossessions and evictions. As he well knows, thousands of families are unable to meet the insolvency criteria set down by this Government. Up to 30,000 families are facing eviction. This is happening every day throughout this country. At the same time, tax exiles and the Irish elite are getting huge write-downs from the banks.

Professor Morgan Kelly recently asked a pertinent question about whether the bankers' friends, the members of rugby clubs and the parents' associations of exclusive fee-paying schools will get first preference for write-downs. As a follow-on question, one might ask whether a house owner or a small shopkeeper-----

Or a friend of a Government Minister.

-----will have a property repossessed on foot of a debt of €50,000 while a friend of the bankers has €500,000, €1 million or €5 million written off.

Someone had €110 million written off.

Can senior bankers give write-downs to each other? Will a banker be able to give a write-down to his political buddies in the local branch or cumann? During the boom years, these bankers gave huge loans to the Irish elite. The same people are now benefitting from these write-downs. The International Monetary Fund said in a recent report that the current situation here endangers social cohesion. The answer to both of the questions I have asked is "Yes". It is a scandal that the banks have sole discretion for write-downs. I appeal to the Taoiseach to introduce legislation to end this scandalous situation.

I do not accept the Deputy's assertion that evictions are happening in this country every day.

Every day.

That is simply not true.

Every day.

There is no need for the Deputy to engage in scaremongering in here and cause many people throughout the country to worry that they are facing eviction.

Representatives of the Money Advice & Budgeting Service will be at the Joint Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform this afternoon. Perhaps the Taoiseach should speak to them. They will tell him about it.

As I have said, the fact of the matter is that people who have problems with their mortgages now have a range of opportunities to work out a solution with the lenders.

What about tenants who have receivers moving in on them?

On the one hand, the Deputies opposite seem to want write-downs, but on the other hand, they do not want write-downs. They need to be clear on what they are actually talking about. I am sure they support the cases that have been sorted out in recent weeks. There are particular circumstances in each case in which a write-down was given.

What about the 30,000 cases that will not get written down?

I am not sure what the Deputies are saying. They do not want write-downs for some people, but they want write-downs for others.

We want fairness. We want the Government to do something.

We are concerned about the write-downs being given to bankers' buddies.

The Deputy should give us a list of the evictions.

The elite were given huge loans during the boom and now they are getting huge write-downs.

We want everyone to be able to retain their houses. When Leaders' Questions has come to a conclusion, perhaps Deputy Healy might furnish me with a full list of the evictions that have taken place in the past two months. That will allow me to assess the veracity of his argument.

Many people in this country who are €20,000 in arrears are not getting write-downs.