Covid-19 Pandemic Supports Dail Éireann — 2020-09-29 ============================================================ Pearse Doherty (SF), Donegal The pandemic, as we know, has caused huge financial distress for households and businesses right across this State. In other jurisdictions, the Minister's counterparts are ensuring that many of these individuals are protected during this period. They have legislated for payment breaks, including payment breaks where interest does not accrue. Crucially, for people living in Germany today, the payment breaks last nine months and, in Portugal, Spain and Italy, they last 12 months. Yet, the Minister sat as majority shareholder in the banks and did nothing to protect these individuals, who will have a negative credit rating from the next couple of days onwards. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2020-09-29/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:48:37+00:00 Sitting date: 2020-09-29