Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I will not explore the issue further other than to say that the bank should not be making that decision on a commercial basis. AIB was rescued by the State. Irish is the national language. If a bank in Strabane can offer four or five languages, including Polish and whatever other languages, possibly Spanish, when there are probably not a huge number of people living in Strabane and using that ATM machine so as to make it commercially sensible, why can AIB not offer an Irish language option? It is the industry norm in mainland Europe to have multiple language options. I ask the witnesses to revisit that decision.

The last issue I want to address with Mr. Byrne is whether it was wrong of AIB not to offer thousands of customers a tracker mortgage. Does he accept the bank was wrong?