John McGuinness (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The question then that is put to me as a member of this committee, by colleagues in the Houses, is whether it is right that the sons, daughters and family members are all treated as having equal status as a PEP. I have had Members of the Houses come to me to say their staff, their children have gone for loans and mortgages in the normal practice of day-to-day life and once it is discovered they are a PEP, they are then put through a different approval process.

They feel that is highly invasive to their children's lives and I can understand that. Other Members have come to me to say that in transferring money from a regular account into a current account, the transaction is often held up because the financial institution is trying to get in touch with the PEP. There is a clear question as to where they got the money but it might be part of their salary being transferred to their current account. While they are waiting for that to happen, particularly in these times of financial pressures, their direct debits may be stopped and all sorts of things may happen.

The consequences of the actions taken by civil servants and politicians in regard to the politically exposed person issue trickle down to family members and people who do not even consider themselves associates of a PEP. It is causing an awful lot of difficulty for families. It may be a civil servant whose son or daughter applies for a mortgage and suddenly has to fill out another 20 pages. There is also the grey area, which Deputy Jim O'Callaghan referred to, whereby there is not enough definition of what a PEP is, what the Central Bank should do or how it should be interpreted down the line at the coalface. There are consequences of this for Ireland and, as Ms McVeigh rightly said, this is a small country and we all will be PEPs. It is strangling the ability of ordinary family members going about their lives in a normal, standard way, without feeling they are some sort of criminal or that there is some doubt about their character.

I accept why Ms McVeigh made the point she did - it was made for perfectly legitimate reasons - but we should not drag all those people into this, where they do not want to be. They do not want to be near politics. They have a regular life, and it has been irregularised by virtue of the fact they are impacted on by this type of legislation. It is my concern that, in some way, they should be separate. I am talking about people who have absolutely no worries. They are not concerned about anything and they just want to get on with their life. They probably despise the fact a member of their family is a politician and would like to distance themselves a little bit from it. That is a fact in Irish life. Those family members will then say, "Look at what you got me into here; I have another 20 pages to fill out." Surely at ministerial level or high Civil Service level, there has to be an injection of common sense into the thought process on this before we all get strangled in something unintentionally, but that is what is happening.