Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

We will not sort that out today but I appreciate it. That is something to be examined.

There are two areas I want to ask about in respect of the volume of complaints. In respect of reckless lending, there is no legal prohibition and no category of reckless lending. Some of us argue there should be. Did the Financial Services Ombudsman receive many complaints about reckless lending, which is something that may be hard to prove? In many of the cases I have heard about, it amounted to a bank manager or someone selling loans in a bank saying that it is a good deal and that people should get on board. That is difficult to prove. Were there many complaints in the area?

There was uproar in England about RBS and Lloyds and what they did with their restructuring divisions for small business, with claims that, in order to maximise the money they could get back on loans that were in trouble to businesses that were generally held to be viable by the people in the businesses, the banks put massive pressure on the small businesses to liquidate assets. This amounted to doing things to effectively close down the business so that the banks could get back the money. Is this something the Financial Services Ombudsman came across? One person told me that the global restructuring division of Ulster Bank is essentially trying to put him out of business.

They were getting direct rental revenue and they were holding back VAT which should have gone to the Revenue Commissioners and were going into people's personal ---