Mr. Brian Hayes:

To address the last question first, this is a huge problem within the European Union which is regularly reflected in debates in the European Parliament's Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs, ECON. As Deputy Burton rightly says, it started even before the fintech revolution, but with the rise of technology in banking banks are getting out of branches and distribution arms. Everything is online. That is putting more and more pressure on the systems as banks move from one platform to the next, which we saw this week not only in Ulster Bank, but in the case of TSB in the UK. It is a huge problem not just for consumers, but for the banks who have to decide how to deal with this and how to provide for it in their balance sheets.

Our consumer protection in the European Union is not good enough. When the tracker mortgage scandal hit I made a complaint directly to Commissioner Vestager asking whether the banks were colluding in this matter. Her investigation remains open on the basis that she has real, genuine power. If one looks at competition policies one will see that the Directorate-General for Competition, DG COMP, has significant power in the European Union. That is not the case in the area of consumer protection. We have not done enough to advance that. It is probably a cop-out for the European institutions to say that the Central Bank of Ireland is the consumer protection arm of the State and that it is up to it to deal with these things. I made a note of what the Deputy said. We have directives on the issue of unfair contracts and on unfair commercial practices, UCP, both of which affect consumers, but they are not within DG COMP. DG COMP has the stick and the power. It can go after institutions with genuine fines and it frightens them. We need to move to that model.

Earlier on we had a discussion on mortgages. I personally believe we need more players in that market. I was making that case. There are two things we could do to help. One is that we could have an EU-wide directive on insolvency which would allow more players into Ireland because they would have more certainty that they could get their money out at the end of it. The second thing is that we need an EU approach to valuations. If we had that there would certainly be more players in financial services. It is the one great failure of the past ten years. A lot of progress has been made on regulation, supervision and putting in a directive on how to resolve banks, but no progress has been made on cross-country financial services, which account for less than 10% of insurance and mortgages. That is work for the next ten years but it cannot be done without proper EU-wide consumer protection. The question is whether member states will give up that function. It will require a significant bumping up of responsibilities at an EU level. Some 85% of all competition cases are taken at member state level. They are not taken by DG COMP. It takes the big cases like Monsanto and Apple but it does not take the other cases of genuine dereliction of duty by businesses. That is something we need to address.