We have prioritised bankers over the needs of vulnerable children

At the height of the boom, we were being told through the media that stress was normal in the Western world and to get on with it.

Which PR outfit coined this baloney? People were rousing small children from their sleep for long days at a crèche before they made arduous daily work commutes.

Quite a few of those commuters, in common with huge numbers of people in the Republic, had new and sizeable mortgages.

Then along comes the crash and jobs are lost. Some people coped with an income from maybe one job instead of two. Some got along for a while with the help of overdrafts or credit cards. Then things got worse.

Hundreds of thousands had mortgages and many were in debt. These people paid for the gross overpricing of property.

Now we have come to a figure of 30,000 properties to be possibly taken from mortgage holders in acute debt?

About 10,000 are non-occupied, another 10,000 are buy-to-let with some of these pension nest eggs or a place for grown-up children to live or go to college from.

And if these houses are taken from these mortgage holders: The people that live in them are set to be evicted. There are liable to be thousands children involved in possible evictions from these properties.

They are children, along with their parents, who have often witnessed desperate stress since 2006 and 2007 and not a lot else. If we are a fully paid-up citizens of a republic then we should not be prepared to allow the very banks that citizens shored up to evict children.

There were 900 so-called repossession orders issued last month. More than 1,000 children are homeless. These evicted children, as all children in this State and generations of children to come, are paying for the greed and the enormous mistakes of bankers, politicians, bondholders and developers too. Many of these same bankers and bondholders are now acting as vulture capitalists.

Elected representatives are telling us it must be so. We must ask why? Is it because vulture capitalists insist on this?

But one must also ask — what would James Connolly have said to desperate parents and their children being evicted by banks?

What would he have said first day when citizens of the Republic were told to save bankers and developers over future generations of Irish men and Irish women?

Tom Ryan

The Forts

Dun Bleisce

(Doon)

Co Limerick