Mr. Patrick Davitt:

It is important to understand that the third solicitor only comes into play when someone is buying a residential investment property, for which there is a third layer of legal. The normal person who is buying a house for the first time will not be affected. As far as we can make out, this only came in over the last eight months. It seems to have followed on from the crash. There was such a thing in Ireland before the crash which was done away with but it has now come back again. The purchaser has to pay for both solicitors.

We think the panel would work as follows: A purchaser buying a property would look at a panel, provided by the bank, of five or ten solicitors in the purchaser's town. The purchaser would engage a solicitor from the panel to buy and convey the property, and the bank would use the same solicitor to certify the title. The purchaser would pay the one solicitor and both sides would be done in-house as opposed to going from A to B with letters and whatever. It would keep the process very tight. From a finance point of view, it would also cost less.