Kieran O'Donnell (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Mr. Deering will appreciate that the matter of the trackers all arose from an individual couple taking a case on trackers against Permanent TSB. One particular case got this whole ball rolling and brought it into the public domain. Permanent TSB eventually admitted it. One of the four witnesses before us here was from that family. They are all individual cases, not a homogeneous group. I wonder whether the Financial Services Ombudsman is making the right decision in effectively abdicating short-term responsibilities to carry out investigations, which may be a bit harsh to say. I would have liked to see the Financial Services Ombudsman continue with the investigations and letting the Central Bank do its work. I would be interested to see the differences in views they would have come up with. The biggest worry here is that we can never get to a point where we know precisely what the number is. It started out at 5,000, went to 10,000, then to 15,000. We are now looking at 20,000 or 30,000 and it could even be more. If the Financial Services Ombudsman is an independent body, could Mr. Deering not do his work independently rather than parking it until the Central Bank returns to it? That is the basis of my question.