Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I will give the Minister an example of a constituent of mine who had a loan with a particular bank. He offered to pay 30% of that loan in a negotiated fashion, but the bank refused that negotiated offer and sold the loan to another firm. That firm was not incorporated on the day the loan was sold, and he understands the loan was sold for 15% of its value, which was 15% less than the money he was offering the bank. He understands also that the third-party financial institution it was sold to is staffed by people who were originally staff members of the first bank. I understand there is an opaque system in existence whereby individuals do not know who owns their mortgage at times and they cannot contact or deal with these organisations.

The Minister mentioned that there is a clear delineation of interaction between service providers and the owners of the debt, but that is not always the case. I am dealing with a hundred different mortgage distress situations in my office, and if one telephones Pepper, a service provider, one will get to a certain level with it but then one has to go back to the original owner of the mortgage to ascertain and get clear information. In the day-to-day aspects of dealing with the banks, it is the citizens' experience that the clean delineation the Minister spoke of is not clear. He mentioned that the Government is on a trajectory of further regulation, but this Bill is on a trajectory of less regulation, because we had stronger regulation in its previous manifestation. Given the fact that under this Bill it will remain opaque as to where the mortgage lies, where it is sold to, that location and the behaviour of that bank, surely cleaning up this process would be to the benefit of the Department of Finance and to the benefit of the citizen. Given the billions of euro we have spent as a result of the lack of regulation, surely regulation should be the default system to which we go as the Legislature. There is no benefit to our leaving gaps in regulation and leaving cloaked or invisible sectors with regard to the citizen. Why is default regulation not the step being taken by the Government and why would it seek to allow for that cloaked sector?