Danny Healy-Rae: Investigate No-Court Property Sales

Thank you very much, Sean Comhairle, and I'm glad to get the opportunity to say a few words and I suppose, like many others have said, that 10 years was an awful time in the lives of many people in our country. Many people lost their homes, they lost their lands, and worse than that, they lost their marriages, and some of them lost their children, and they lost everything, and some of them even lost their lives. And it was a terrible time, and now is one that many people regretted and resented, and liquidators and vulture funds and all the things that happened, and like I said, homes being taken. And I suppose the thing that I worry about most is there was no court order in certain cases, many cases, no court order. Liquidators and receivers took it upon themselves to close the book on people, and to sell their properties, and there were many instances where the owners, the farmer owners, were attempting to buy back their property from the receiver, and they wouldn't be allowed, because the receiver had favourites to sell it to, and sort it to their own, and maybe to their own families as well. And I think that still needs to be followed up. Where there was property sold, home sold, and there was no court order, that should be investigated and followed up, because that to me is totally wrong. The court is sacrosanct in that instance, and they should have been engaged with, and it should have gone through the courts to ensure proper. I can't understand how a deed could be taken off of someone and passed on to someone else, or was there new deeds written, or what happened at all, that new people could take over your land and you're still having the deed of it, and the courts never took it off you. I can't understand that. And like many others have said there, the universal social charge was brought in, and at that time of financial trying to keep the country running, I don't think there's a need for it now, and many working class people are still suffering, and I don't really understand why you're closing the book now, because I'm worried that there's still people out there that maybe have not been dealt with properly, and that we'll be closing some legal gap for them to come back and to fight their case, and maybe get their property or their value back again. I'm a bit worried about it, Minister. I'm not sure of that. I want to thank, especially, like has been done before by Deputy McGrath, I want to thank John McGuinness as Chairman of the Public Accounts for the fearless way that he dealt with many of the people and the tough questions that had to be asked and answered, and I appreciate him very much for being straightforward and honest as he could, regardless of where it would have left him. I have a special hatred for vulture funds, and I think that there should be no place for them, and if people had engagement with the banks or if they had dealt with the banks for to get a loan or to get a mortgage or whatever it was, I felt that the bank should be still looking for that and not vulture funds, because they did desperate things to people, they forced people, they regarded people, and they did everything in the world to people, and I regret and resent that, and I will always remember it as being a desperate, undemocratic time in the people's lives, in the whole of the country. And as I said before, the fact that there was no court order in many instances, I hope that that will be dealt with, because many people won't be dealt with fairly until that's tested out and tried out, because I feel many people were left behind and dealt with wrongly where there was no court order, their place was put up for sale, a certain auction date, and maybe not even advertised enough or publicly enough, their places were sold behind their backs in many instances without going through any court or no judge making, giving a court order that their property, their houses, or their land could have been sold. I hope that someday that those people will get fairness and get retribution for what happened. Again, I'm so sorry for the people that lost their lives and lost their marriages, losing property is one thing, but there's families, and life is much more precious than anything material like that. There's so much that happened, Minister, I'm not sure why, I'm a bit worried why you're doing this, and the other aspect of it, who decided that this new chairman, or CEO, or whatever he's going to be, is going to get 400,000 plus? Why does it have to be that amount of money? I don't honestly think that there's no man or woman in the state worth that kind of money. And when you think of all the people that suffered financially, maybe for small sums of money, when you look back on it, this is a massive sum of money to be giving one man and to me making a job for him. I don't think he'll get much praise for this Minister because it's another big job for some one of the boys, and I couldn't stand over that. I can't, I can't, I couldn't vote for that Minister and I won't be voting for it either. I couldn't see that despair on the people that suffered back over the years, and especially the last 15 years.