Pearse Doherty (Donegal South West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the witnesses to the committee. I have been going through the figures. We have had two sessions with representatives of AIB and Bank of Ireland. I will not rehearse all of that but I ask the witnesses to read the transcripts. Everything I said to them about providing the information this committee required is applicable to the witnesses also. It is disrespectful not to give us a submission and disrespectful not to give us the figures we need in written format. The witnesses know exactly what they are doing. The banks know exactly what they are doing. There are about a dozen committee members here. It is a case of running down the clock while we try to prise the information from the witnesses instead of getting to the depth of the issue.

I want to move to the detail of what this proposal by Government and the Central Bank was about. The witnesses know it better than me. There were 20% targets for quarter two but that was only the first part of it. There were 30% targets for quarter three and 50% targets for quarter four. The Central Bank was supposed to come out at the start of the summer and say that those targets were offers, but they were supposed to set targets for acceptance of offers. The witnesses accept that. To meet the targets today, the witnesses have relied on 82% of the offers being legal letters. I am not sure how customers can accept those legal letters, and it is the same with AIB and the Bank of Ireland, but it goes against the spirit of what this measure that was introduced in March was all about. In my view, this was about forcing the banks finally to step up to their responsibilities and deal with this issue.

In the last quarter, Mr. Brown's bank had issued 4,124 legal letters. If people are not engaging, they should be engaging. If people are not talking to the bank, they should be engaging and the bank has to do what it needs to do, but there are customers of Mr. Brown's bank who have been engaging and who are trying to come up with solutions and he has failed to come up with solutions for them. The problem here is that AIB and Bank of Ireland have done the same thing. To reach the targets, they issued a couple of thousand legal letters, but this was about the genuine people who wanted a solution to allow them get on with their lives. Why did the witnesses not deal with that? If they take away the legal repossessions, the number of long-term offers made in quarter two was 1,048, which would mean that they missed the target by about 75%. Bank of Ireland relied 50% on legal letters, AIB relied 70% on legal letters and Ulster Bank are relying 82% on legal letters. That is my first question. Why did Ulster Bank not deal with the customers who genuinely are engaging and want a resolution but who have not been offered one so far?