Mr. David Hall:

An interesting question in the context of the Deputy's reference to the Central Bank coming before the committee is who regulates the regulator. It is a serious question in respect of the Central Bank. Who regulates the regulator? The Central Bank has statutory powers for consumer protection on one floor and the floor above regulates vulture funds and banks. There are excellent staff in the Central Bank and the same is true of the vulture funds. The vulture funds have excellent staff and a number of the funds have recently changed their dynamic and changed how they do business and have been quite positive in their co-operation with insolvency arrangements and other such creative solutions. It is not all bad, but if I am a customer and I am under massive pressure, my debt is a powerful thing. It is difficult to explain how debt can surround people, pull them down and completely paralyse them, no matter how strong, powerful, big or small they are. We have all seen it. We see it everyday, with some of the biggest and most powerful people in the world getting crippled and crucified by debt. They can go off and have a big debate somewhere, go off and play a football match or something but they cannot speak to someone in a bank. That is a massive challenge.

Mr. Kissane referred to people who are not engaging. There are people who are not engaging and the key there must be that there are no unnecessary repossessions. Is it not unusual that we have 500 housing charities, 700 cancer charities but only two charities in the country dealing with debt? Billions upon billions of euro are involved but there is no safe haven for people to go to. There is MABS, the Insolvency Service of Ireland and the IMHO, so there is no excuse not to seek help. That is our area of expertise. One of the biggest reliefs we provide for people is taking the phone call from the bank. The simplest, most basic and elementary function we provide is getting an authority from somebody for the phone calls. That said, a bank may not engage on every occasion. Sometimes it will ignore those authorities but who then can challenge the Central Bank to ensure that bank is penalised for that? Who regulates the regulator? In the absence of any independent scrutiny of the regulator, customers cannot have confidence in that entity.