Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I appreciate that. The reason I asked that question is that there is a bit of grey area in that the role, the responsibilities are basically passed on to the Central Bank of Ireland, which carries out those functions and has a statutory function to carry out those functions. In my view, the Central Bank of Ireland does not have the resources to carry out those functions and has done a terrible job on it in the past number of years. Given that the Central Bank of Ireland is 200 staff members below what its internal documents suggest should be its staff complement, then something is giving and it is probably the consumer protection role that suffers.

We have seen scandal after scandal over the years. Ms Goggin referred to confidence in banks but confidence has been shattered. We have seen 15,000 customers wrongly taken off tracker or not put on tracker mortgages. We have seen the payment protection insurance, PPI, scandal, which has seen tens of thousands of individuals, and a court case earlier this year, which was withdrawn from the Court of Appeal, which means that the case stands, namely, that a financial company mis-sold payment protection insurance, PPI, which was not detected by the Central Bank in its assessment, yet organisations such as the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission is saying nothing about it. Given the consumer protection role of the CCPC and bearing in mind the consumer protection role the Central Bank has, is there not a responsibility for the CCPC to make people aware that a major financial institution sold a product here which has been found by the High Court to constitute mis-selling and that all the products that was sold by it, a number which runs to thousands, were sold under the exact same contract and therefore the consumers should check their contract to see if they were conned by this institution? Is that not a role that the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission should play? Does the CCPC have a statutory role or remit to do that?