Gerry Horkan (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Governor, Mr. Sibley and Ms Rowland for their opening statements and for the 51-page report, which I read in great detail. We have touched on parts of it but there is much more of it we have not got to yet. Even though we have been questioning the witnesses for two hours, there is quite a lot of it we have not been able to reach as yet. It is important, however, that I touch on the question of tracker mortgages. It may not be for the culture report to do but there is a body of work to be done to work out, at some point, how every bank managed to make almost identical mistakes with tracker mortgages independently of each other. It is difficult for an ordinary person with any level of common sense not to wonder how there was not some level of semi-collusion or semi-discussion about it. Ireland is a small place and people talk to each other. Perhaps one bank said it was tightening the rules and putting on a bit of pressure and then everybody started doing it in the same way that everybody started running after Anglo Irish Bank when it started performing in a particular way. They all seemed to say that it is working for it, so let us all copy the model history says should not have worked. There is a body of work to be done on that. I am not saying it should have been done via the culture report, but the report has been compiled as a result of the tracker problem.