Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

I am conscious that I will probably be getting outside of my time limit soon. I have two final small questions. Out of the 38,000 mortgage holders Mr. Kincaid mentioned, honestly, I cannot imagine the majority of those people will be knowledgeable enough to understand that that is the process. It seems to me that there is a reactive policy by the Central Bank to say, "Well, if people come to us, we will try to look at it". In this time of crisis, people are being put to the pin of their collars and interest rates are so high. Let us say that their €600 monthly repayment may go up to €1,000. In those peoples' minds, the viability of continuing with the mortgage decreases. There is no doubt in my mind that those vulture funds are saying, "Well okay guys, you need to consider selling up here. You need to go into a mortgage to rent situation. We need to crystallise this investment in this higher-price building market". That is as likely to happen as a person saying, "Well, hold on here. I am pushing back. I am going to make sure that my rights are upheld". We must make sure everybody knows that.

The Central Bank needs to be much more proactive on that.

My final question relates to public banking. We have a really strange situation in this country whereby nearly every political party states it is in favour of a public banking system but we have an incredibly overly-concentrated banking market. We only have two real players and because of their enormous supplier power, they can dictate most of the elements of engagement with customers. We need more competition. Competition is obviously an objective of the Central Bank. Has there been any analysis of the contribution public banking could make to the Irish economy? Would it be a benign, positive or negative force? Is it something that would operate positively in the banking system?