Irish Mortgage Brokers on Today FM

We were asked to speak with Gavin Reilly on TodayFM’s ‘The Last Word’ where he was sitting in for Matt Cooper, to discuss a new piece of proposed legislation.

While we believe that all people are deserved of compassion and respect when it comes to financial difficulties with their family home, that it would be an error to expect the judiciary to somehow step in and make what are effectively family protection and social protection decisions on something that should be viewed via the contract.

Mortgages arrears are also more of a symptom than the inherent disease, the disease is low employment, job loss, a lack of low income housing, social housing and social supports. It would be an error to misdiagnose this and in short, only an academic or a politician could look at this problem and see the solution in the way that this proposed legislation outlines it.

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Is equality about money or rights?

In this piece which appeared originally in the Sunday Business Post on the 8th of May 2016, Karl Deeter questions the conventional wisdom of calls for a right to housing (or housing equality) being about ‘rights’ and that it is perhaps more about money and governance.

The script after this text in italics is the text of the article that was published.

When we hear people talk about inequality or social issues like housing, is it about money and process or is it about rights? This may seem obvious at first, but when you start to look into it, often it’s not so simple.

It’s obvious that a person with no place to call home isn’t equal to those who have such a place (be it rented or owned) and civil society generally accepts that this implies a certain level of duty on the rest of us.

Usually the state helps to equalise this situation by making the provision of a place to call home possible, be it social housing or emergency accommodation. This would lead to the assumption that …

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