Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

It is not the view of the Parliament. We are not a market. We have a duty to citizens. A bank has a duty to customers, including people who have engaged with Permanent TSB for months and years. I have with me a letter from a customer who tells me that his file is yea deep after years of engagement with the bank. The letter asks simple questions about whether his is one of the loans that the bank is planning to sell to the vultures. The letter went to Mr. Masding's office, but the response sent this month was that the bank could not tell the customer. It did this even though, seeing as how it provided us with the figures of exactly how many loans were in each bundle, it knows which loans are being considered for sale, but it has refused to tell this individual whether his is one of them. There is a duty of care, not just in terms of the taxpayers' money.

The Minister for Finance did not put his hand into his own pocket at the time. He put his hands into the pockets of the Irish people, customers of the witnesses' bank. As such, not only is there a duty to repay that to the Irish State, there is a duty of care to the customers. The Parliament is stating clearly that it does not want Permanent TSB, as a State-owned institution, to sell these loans to the vultures. The bank needs to work through these loans in a more aggressive way. The witnesses need to look at how other banks have got around the rules. They need to wait for the response of the working group of the European Commission or the European Central Bank and deal with these loans on a case-by-case basis.