Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome our guests to the meeting. We have a lot to get through; I hope we get through as much of it as possible. I thank them for answering the questions in the questionnaire. That is very helpful.

I will turn to Mr. Hayes to give us the real scéal. All the banks' representatives have told us how wonderful they are doing in terms of providing resources to customers. With regard to the average call waiting times, in Permanent TSB it is four minutes, it is two minutes and 53 seconds in Bank of Ireland, one to ten minutes in AIB, 21 seconds in KBC Bank, which is topping the league, and 50 seconds in Ulster Bank. However, the Central Bank carried out an investigation and said that the longest call waiting times in some of the retail banks were unacceptably high, with customers waiting over two hours in some cases, and that some telephone lines had an abandoned rate of over 50%. I can speak of that from personal experience, as a person who was on the telephone for over an hour with one of the banks, and I will not mention which. Eventually I hung up because I was so frustrated. Then there is the number of customers. How is it that all the banks' representatives are telling this committee that they have waiting times as little as in the seconds when the Central Bank is telling us that in some cases it is in the hours?