Mr. John O'Connell:

There is a degree of fog around the numbers. The banks are converting a lot of people who are still working and who were working at the start of the year within the banks, and people are being made redundant. There was a high number of redundancies over the past month in the banks so if they are still making people redundant it is not a fixed piece. One of the most cynical moves during Covid was the reduction in call centre hours. You can look at some of the websites today and they still refer to the hours being temporarily reduced due to Covid, staffing issues and so forth. That became permanent in some of the banks and staff numbers were reduced accordingly. That went to the point where the Central Bank identified that there was an average of a two-hour wait for calls. I ask the Deputy to put himself in the shoes of someone working in that call centre who receives a call from any of us after we have waited for two hours. It will not be a pleasant exchange but that is the exchange they have every day. That is why we have concerns about the mental well-being of employees in the banks.