Mr. Padraic Kissane:

It is a hugely emotive issue. One thing which is common is that I have had no one come to me to say that the bank did it. In any appeal I have dealt with, I have not met anyone who would get out of a car and say they had whiplash unless they had it, in other words we are not naturally a claiming nation. This involves middle Ireland which pays for everything. It is people who ordinarily would never argue, complain, claim or appeal about anything. Over the many hundreds of meetings I have had, I have come to understand it and can see the upset in their eyes and in what they tell me. When people visit my office, they may share a bed but they are on separate pillows. Both are pretending to be asleep but both are awake.

Niamh Byrne was of of four customers before this committee. Thankfully Niamh has been redressed by Ulster Bank but the other three are in the same position that they were in in October. I recall Hazel Melbourne told this committee that she was literally begging it to help them. She does not say that lightly, and she is a special lady anyway. I recall Jenny who said "I might be 74 years but I am not dead". She lost three of her investment properties. I have hundreds or thousands of these cases. One must be careful, however. It is fine to continue and wallow in the difficulty but something that I say to many clients is that the problem may not be solved tonight but it is shared. They need to be given assistance to show them how to get out of this. Remember, until they received the redress letter, many of these people did not have a tunnel never mind a light at the end of it. There are cases. In common with the staff issue, it is not something that I would like to politicise or get public kudos for it but members can be certain that it has happened. It is not something that I wish to speak about publicly. It is too personal to people and it is something that I would handle with greater care than any other matter at issue here out of respect for the people who are picking up the pieces and who are still here. The media ask me to get people who lost their homes to talk to them but nobody will. Shame alone stops people from doing that; there is embarrassment having learned the excuses they gave for having to move from their home are now lies. One cannot expect them to do that. I was intrigued to see KBC tell this committee that of the six owner-occupied properties lost as a result of the bank's error and failure, it still had five in its possession. Good luck with moving back into that house. It is an impossibility. KBC thought this would be easy, that it still owned the properties so that it might give the customers back the house. Imagine the evening those people had to move out and think of the state of play, particularly for the children. I could have any bank before me, but when children are affected I get angry because that is unfair and it is abuse. It might be financial abuse and dressed up in white collars, but I do not care, it is still abuse. Parents have to take difficult choices, and I do not mean not taking holidays, Irish courses or so on, I mean real issues such as the standard of food they are giving. I raise this because it is the culture that must change. Banks telling people that they must stop shopping at a particular shop and they must shop elsewhere to save more money has to stop.