Kieran O'Donnell (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I did not say they would go up. What I said was that if one has new entrants in the market, one would expect interest rates to come down. If one has a barrier to new entrants, the worry would be in respect of a Central Bank review that finds that providers are charging a rate that is more than one third higher than the average variable interest rate charged by all mortgage providers. If there are only five or six mortgage providers on the market and the average rate is 5%, the rate can be one third higher than that. Let us assume, however, that there are 20 mortgage providers in the market and the average rate suddenly fell to 3%. The only issue of consequence would be that if the legislation acts as a barrier to entry, someone could end up paying a higher rate because the average rate would be higher. In such circumstances, the one third rule would not work because if more entrants had entered the market, the average rate would be much lower.