Seán Crowe, Sinn Féin TD for Dublin South West, has called on the government to urgently tackle legal moneylenders who are charging financially vulnerable people interest rates as high as 288%.

A Central Bank report has found that approximately 360,000 people are currently going to moneylenders. The research found that the most likely customer for a moneylender was a married mother-of-two in her late 30s or early 40s.

Deputy Seán Crowe said:

“The recent report released from the Central Bank on moneylenders makes very grim reading.

“About 360,000 have to use these unscrupulous moneylenders who are exploiting the financially vulnerable with 1 in 4 people having trouble in repaying the loans.

“This is a jump of 9% in 2007 to 25% in 2013.

“The government has continually introduced anti-growth, anti-worker, and anti-family economic policies, and the result is that household incomes have dropped so much that working families are being forced to borrow from these moneylenders to pay basic bills to keep a roof over their head and food on the table.

“In the run up to Christmas and with the government’s harsh austerity budget for next year coming into force, I believe we will see another rise in the amount of people being forced to use these moneylenders.

“Last year Sinn Féin introduced draft legislation in the Dáil which proposed to place a limit on the interest rates that moneylenders are allowed to charge; currently these moneylenders are not subject to any legal ceiling on the rates they can charge.

“This legislation would have introduced a new limit of 40% interest on any funds lent by a moneylender, but the government opposed the legislation because they said it would threaten the viability of the sector.

“It’s time the government wakes up and sees the harm that these moneylenders are doing with their extortionate rates. I am calling on them to urgently tackle this issue and introduce a fair interest ceiling limit for money lending in this state.

“They also need to introduce a new system to facilitate micro loans particularly for those vulnerable people who have no other avenue of getting access to urgently needed cash.”

ENDS