Michael McGrath (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Chairman. I welcome Mr. Deering and his colleagues and commend him and his management team and all of his staff in the work that they do. I always find his office very good to deal with and the function it performs is important for consumers.

I will start by asking Mr. Deering about the tracker mortgage issue. A while ago I read an article written by Charlie Weston in the Irish Independenton 28 November 2009 where he said that one of Mr. Deering's predecessors, Mr. Joe Meade, had written to the then Financial Regulator asking that a probe be carried out because of some findings that he had arrived at, where some lenders had denied people the right to a tracker rate after coming off a fixed rate of interest. Does Mr Deering believe that a lot of time was lost before this issue was escalated to the level that it should have been escalated to, which should have been much earlier? It was late 2015 before the Central Bank instituted an industry-wide probe. Has Mr. Deering reviewed the original files and correspondence from 2009 as to what the response was, for example?