Mr. Gary Tobin:

If we can imbue the many thousands of people who work in the banking sector with a good set of behaviours, it will be of benefit to customers.

The Deputy mentioned individuals applying for their first mortgage and she is right. There is an asymmetric information relationship because the bank representative has all the information and knowledge, which the customer does not have. It is a somewhat unequal relationship, which is why it is important to have the right regulatory framework in place and culture is part of that. She also hit the nail on the head by referring to financial literacy, which is increasingly referred to as "financial capability". There is an issue in many countries, arguably including Ireland, in that our populations may not be as financial literate or capable as they need to be. This is going to be a real challenge going forward and the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission has recently done a study on the issue of financial capability. It has put forward some interesting suggestions for how financial literacy in Ireland could be improved.

It is a bit like health promotion. Rather than addressing an issue when somebody falls ill, we want to get people to act in a healthy way so that they do not get ill in the first place. In the same way, we want people to make good financial decisions so that they do not get themselves into financial difficulty.

The Deputy asked about the home loan scheme under Rebuilding Ireland. It is a programme of the Departments of Housing, Planning and Local Government and Public Expenditure and Reform, and the Department of Finance is not involved.

On the question of appointing consumer champions to banks, the Minister for Finance has recently made two significant appointments to the Central Bank Commission. One is Mr. John Trethowan, who is the credit reviewer and who deals with small and medium-sized businesses, SMEs, on a weekly and daily basis which are having difficulties with banks. He has a wealth of experience in understanding the difficulties that SMEs have with banks. The other is Niamh Moloney, a renowned academic who is head of law at the London School of Economics and was the head of the consumer panel on the Central Bank.

There was a suggestion that large corporate landlords were buying up properties. The economic research team in the Department of Finance has recently published an interesting analysis on this issue. I do not claim to be an expert but the research is available on our website and we can make it available to the committee. Its general conclusion is that, to date, such investment is relatively modest in the overall scheme of things. It tends to be quite high profile because it is often in high-profile areas, particularly in Dublin. It is small in scale relative to all the new building that is going on.

Deputy Burton also made an interesting point about the move to digitalisation and online banking. As consumers decide to move to online and phone banking, leaving fewer and fewer bricks-and-mortar bank branches, we need to avoid creating a new set of consumers who are left behind in the process of digitalisation. There are particular concerns for older citizens, who should be able to access digital banking in a convenient way.