Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the witnesses back to Dublin. I will come back to the broader tax issue later but I will first speak to a slightly different area. This week we had another event with Ulster Bank and I am asking about consumer protection. Frankly, I do not believe the bank's explanation. European banking is part of the global banking process and there is a massive amount of outsourcing of back office services to different countries. In 2012, Ulster Bank had a disastrous meltdown with its accounting functions. It was a systems breakdown that might have been affected by outsourcing to countries around the world by the parent company, Royal Bank of Scotland.

This is apparently an extraordinary case of human error, with somebody pressing or not pressing a button or whatever, leading to people's accounts losing much money. We are all expected to trust that banks are okay, even given what happened as recently as 2012. Many pensioners right across Ireland have pensions from places like the Department of Social Protection paid directly into bank accounts, as it is the mechanism of choice. The problem in 2012 went on for a number of weeks, leading to difficulty for many people. Consumer protection and regulation is definitely a problem in Ireland but is it a European problem? There is a destructive tension between regulation and consumer protection, and the loser is always consumer protection. We really do not get adequate reports on what happens. Perhaps somebody fell asleep in this case or was working for too long. We have not heard anything and the bank told us nothing happened, except that many people's accounts were affected. It was a major event in banking.

Do the witnesses have a view on that tension between consumer protection and regulation? They will both be aware that here in Dublin the Central Bank is responsible for consumer protection as well as regulation. There is a separate but much weaker consumer protection agency. In respect of much relating to the trackers and, particularly, to distressed mortgages in cases where people are making an effort to pay, if there was a stronger consumer protection model it would be possible to get deals done for people who are co-operating. That is my view. From a European point of view, do the witnesses get any sense of that?

The second thing again relates to Ireland. For approximately six years a German bank has been offering to run a pilot somewhere in Ireland, possibly in the middle or north of the midlands, around small-scale banking based on the German model. Mr. Hayes will remember from his time in the Department that this German bank was coming in to meet people and so on. To be perfectly honest, there seems to be incredible negativity towards that initiative. Do the witnesses also find that in Europe? Clearly banks are fleeing less well-off parts of big cities and towns. There is often not even an ATM. The same is true in significant numbers of rural areas. From a consumer service point of view, do the witnesses have any sense of there being a European model which we could access? Clearly there has been a deal with An Post in respect of its potential future viability. However that will again take a bit of time. They are my two questions.