Gerry Horkan (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome Professor Lane and his team. I take the point that the Chairman and Senator Paddy Burke have made.

We have already commented that we only got a link to Professor Lane's opening statement at 8.43 a.m. so we did not have much time before the meeting to study it. However, we have certainly had time to do so since the meeting commenced. The tone of the statement is quite self-congratulatory and phrases such as "lenders have been forced to pay", "hauled in lenders" and "the examination is delivering for consumers" are used. Realistically, however, most people - or at least everyone affected by this, as well as those who are not personally involved but who are watching these proceedings - will ask why it ever happened. It should never have happened. The Financial Regular was part of the Central Bank at the time and has been reunified with it following a period of separation. How did the regulator ever allow this to happen? In any report that comes out in the future, we must get to the bottom of how every bank managed separately, so we are told, to make the same mistakes with the same customers in the same way. We want to get to the bottom of who is getting their money and when, but has an analysis been carried out in the context of that to which I refer? I accept the argument that when the kitchen is on fire, one puts out the fire before working out what caused it. However, what happened should never have happened. The supervisory mechanisms and processes should have been in place.

This kind of behaviour has almost certainly affected far more than 30,000 households. It will probably have been found to have affected closer to 40,000 before we are finished examining the matter. That number can be multiplied by the large number of people in the families affected. Huge numbers of the Irish population were affected by this. I am sure their extended families ended up having to help out if money was short. The customers in question were paying out huge amounts of their own cash - wrongly, because it was demanded of them - to banks that were not entitled to that money. Professor Lane said the banks have been "forced to pay €316 million in redress". Banks have been forced to give people back their own money. Has there been any analysis as to how every bank did the same thing in the same way in such a slipshod manner? It was clearly not in the interests of their customers, although it may have been in the interests of the banks' profitability in the short term. Obviously, they hoped they would never be found out, even if their profitability in the long term would be damaged by their actions. Has there been any analysis as to how they all managed to make the same mistakes in the same way?