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

I take the Minister's point about the amendment. This arises under section 17, detailing the purposes for which the information may be used by credit information providers. It was not so long ago that many people, including me, got phone calls from financial institutions telling me that an overdraft had been extended again and again. At one stage we figured out that between overdrafts and credit cards we had €21,000 of extended credit by financial institutions, which was crazy. The intention of this amendment is to ensure that financial institutions cannot use the information available to them on the credit register to partake in that kind of activity.

The amendment endeavours to ensure that a credit information provider could access the register to evaluate risks but only on the basis of somebody applying for a loan. We could examine the wording. We do not want to see certain financial institutions deciding to start offering loans to people with a good credit history or cherrypicking the register in trying to encourage people to-----