John McGuinness (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I just want to press this point. When one looks at this, and when one examines the correspondence that we have all received, and there is a huge amount of it, it is clear that the bank took action to take money from their customers illegally. Now they are going to redress it. They are now robbing the rights of the customer to proper redress and proper compensation by dragging their heels and ignoring them. That comes across in every single piece of correspondence I have read through over recent months.

I say again that it is outrageous the banks are seemingly getting away with this. In some cases they will get away with it because they have broken the customer in the process. That is the outrage that jumps off the page, as it were, in the context of this correspondence. Some of these people dealt with the banks for 20 and 30 years, and now they are being treated like this. If the banks were really honest about it and wanted to resolve this, we would not be having these committee meetings. They would be out in the regions, meeting their customers, calling them in and offering them a course of action. We are going to have to call in the banks again now to go through all the details with them because they are simply not telling the truth about their engagement with the different affected customers.

I accept the job the Central Bank is doing, but there is something not right here and there is a relationship issue between the banks and their customers. To go back to Ms Rowland, civil law, and the rights of customers under that law, is just being ignored. The banks are just ignoring it.