John McGuinness (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

All right. I shall comment on the public interest directors because other members have passed comment. At the time I presumed that the term "public interest directors" meant they would examine the activities in the bank to ensure that as far as the State was concerned and, therefore, the citizen, the banks behaved correctly. Instead the banks behaved badly in terms of their governance, their activities with customers and clients, their lending criteria and all of that. To be quite frank, the public interest directors are not doing a very good job. They get paid well for what they do.

They have a particular role which need not necessarily clash with their duties as directors. What I would expect from them is what I imagine the citizen would expect, and that can be equated to good governance. It is not a big deal. Without wanting them to interfere with the SME sector, when we talk about lending to the SMEs the truth is that they are not lending. That has been said by the national bodies representing businesses and economic commentators in general.

The figures we are getting are massaged to a degree. Deputy Donohoe made the point this morning, for example, that people make an application but they do not become part of the analysis until their application has been looked at and they are told they can continue with the application because it is likely to be approved. They are outside the analysis. When a business goes to a bank, it could emerge with a restructured overdraft, termed a loan, and no overdraft to continue the business, or one could present requesting a loan and be analysed without being brought into the system itself. In other words, the bank will talk to a person about the loan but it does not process one's application. Therefore, one is not part of the statistics that are eventually presented to the Department of Finance or elsewhere. I thought the public interest directors would have called the banks' bluff with regard to that activity.

Likewise in respect of their legal services departments, it appears that the process is held up, and can be held up, for years. I am breaking this down relative to High Street, Ireland, and the retailers who are in difficulty and who need an overdraft to continue. It can be extended into an industry with which I am familiar, the transport industry. It can be extended to people who already have debt with the banks because they have built up a property portfolio on the back of a good business. The banks do not deal with it, and the public interest directors do not blow the whistle on these banks. We cannot do much with them because the statistics being presented to us do not include this activity. The banks, to a degree, have their heads in the sand about much of this. I would have hoped that the public interest directors and the Department of Finance would be a little more difficult in dealing with the banks to get them to respond, because they are closing businesses in this country and ruining the potential of good entrepreneurs to create employment. I am presenting that as a fact based on information gathered at my clinics or from listening to business people expressing this in their organisations. We received a submission from RGDATA recently which discussed this, and the banks were central to its criticism. Is this something you will take up with the public interest directors, or that you would bear in mind with regard to the policy as it is being developed by the banks?