Mr. Jerry Beades:

It is wholesale throughout all the banks. I attended some of the meetings in the North of Ireland when Mr. Tomlinson came over from the UK, which were also attended by Ms Lavin, when this opened up. As a result of attending the meetings, I discovered I was a victim of GRG. As Deputy McGrath knows, I have been on ACC's case and on the case of a number of other banks and I did not need another front opening up.

However, we in Friends of Banking Ireland had been following Ulster Bank and I have spoken publicly on it. Ulster Bank was also operating 27 legal entities, including Ulster Bank Ltd. and Ulster Bank Ireland Ltd. The 27 legal entities, between business names and companies in Northern Ireland, the UK and Ireland, were operating in the Republic. When they were taking people to court, and this is a similar issue in respect of Bank of Ireland and Bank of Ireland Private Banking, one discovered that the wrong bank was taking the person to court, yet the court ignored it. The attitude was "So what, you owe them money", which has been happening in the courts. That is why I mentioned the Judiciary issue.

We had been lobbying before this current round. The then chief executive of Ulster Bank appeared in the House of Commons four years ago and we contacted Sammy Wilson MP and got him to ask questions of the chief executive on a raft of issues. Ulster Bank is rotten to the core. It was involved in changing the indexes on its Irish subsidiaries from 2006 on, which resulted in changing contract terms, writing to people and giving them options. If one did not take the option, it changed one's contracts. All of these letters have gone missing. They are not on people's files and one cannot get them under data protection. It is a complete and utter mess. While we are discussing Ulster Bank here, this is replicated across almost every bank, unregulated by the Central Bank.