Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 9 April 2019

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach

Business of Joint Committee
Matters Relating to the Banking Sector: Permanent TSB

Photo of Gerry HorkanGerry Horkan (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

It is Mr. Masding's right to keep going. At this stage, he is the longest-serving chief executive of the five major banks. He is the only one who was in situat the start of this committee's reign and who remains. Long may that continue but my point was about how the comment was worded. The taxpayer is the taxpayer, but everybody is a taxpayer. When we speak about the taxpayer, we mean the public finances and the money that is invested in the public system. One hopes that the sum of €1.2 billion or whatever it is will be returned to the taxpayer, but the important point that many ordinary individuals took a significant hit had not been made. It happened in the case of Anglo Irish Bank shares and other shares. Customers may have sold a large property, downsized and invested all the money in what were always called "safe bank shares" when I was growing up. They were not necessarily wealthy people. Although they might have been by some people's standards, they were not captains of industry or on a large salary. While, admittedly, Mr. Masding's bank has the lowest percentage of staff earning more than €100,000, there remain more than 100 people on more than €100,000 and the remuneration of the top 66 is a healthy average of nearly €200,000. There are people with much less money than that.

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