Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

That is very disappointing, if not surprising. The irony is that Deputy Fleming, who is the Minister of State with responsibility for insurance, brought legislation before the House that only asks for a report on dual pricing. He then went on radio and claimed that he was going to ban dual pricing but he had no hand, act or part in that. He knows that it was me who made the complaint to the Central Bank. I sat down with the Governor and convinced him to carry out the study. The Central Bank published its report last year in terms of the way forward but the Minister of State did not even make a submission to the consultation process, unlike Sinn Féin. The Minister of State produced legislation that asks the Central Bank to give the Government a report on how it is going when it is finally implemented in July. This amendment is asking for the same thing. It is asking for a report not just on the specifics contained in the legislation but also on wider issues in terms of the regulatory impact elsewhere, as regulators are clamping down on BNPL. If the Government wants to deal with this in four years' time, in the same way it has dealt with the PCP issue, that is fine. I am conscious that Fianna Fáil was not in government then but it supported the previous Government. It took over four years, since I began raising these issues, to bring forward legislation but we do not know that this legislation will have an effect this year.

Why would the Minister of State resist having a report of this nature? Indeed, a better response from the Minister of State and one which would be acceptable to me would be not to put this into legislation but to give a commitment to ask the Central Bank to provide a report on the BNPL market, its potentials, pitfalls, the international regulatory framework and any recommendations it sees fit to make. The bank might determine that there is a cause for concern here in terms of consumer protection and higher debt and it might determine that this market is going to grow based on what is happening elsewhere. On that basis, I press the amendment.