Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

That is not true. My experience in this goes back a long way and includes dealing with AIB. I do not mind a bank saying what it does, provided it does that. I have been in front of staff from several banks where the cold eyes of the lending institution had one target only, namely, getting a hold of the property and putting it on the market as quickly as possible. That is my personal experience. I am not satisfied that what the witnesses have told me in that respect is in accordance with the facts.

I am not suggesting they are deviating from the truth. I am merely saying that in order to do the job I have to do, while remembering I have to do this along with many other jobs and I am only one person. I and my office staff have gone to countless ends with the banking system over the past number of years. I worked extraordinarily hard to set up alternatives to avoid and avert the repossession of the property of what are now called the ordinary people. It drives me up the wall when I, or my constituent, hear or read about a write-off of hundreds of thousands or millions of euro, whatever the case may be, in a particular instance, without the information being made available to the general public that this was an uncollectible debt, and that various efforts were made to collect the debt but it was uncollectible. By "uncollectible" I simply mean the assets of the collateral that were there originally are no longer in existence. By the way, the bank may already have repossessed the collateral; there is no reference to that at all. That collateral may have achieved a greater value than meets the eye in the intervening period.

I will make a last point. I agree with the concept of full and final settlement. I also believe that the credit rating of the person in the eye of the storm needs to be carefully looked after. In most cases, that person has spouses, families and so on and so forth. An individual's uncollectible debt may be written off and he or she will not have to pay anything but the person cannot borrow anything for five years or more, depending on what the case may be and, in some cases, longer than that. That creates a problem and a vision of unfairness people are very alert to. Two issues need to be dealt with. There needs to be an explanation as to what debt is written off. Is it an uncollectible debt? Is it residual debt? Of course, residual debt can pop up again in four or five years' time and become part of the debt. That is why I asked about full disclosure. If full disclosure has not been made or taken place, anything can happen in the next five, six or ten years. It is very important the general public get to know that the rules being applied are the same rules for everybody and that there is no suggestion anywhere of special deals for special people or preferential borrowers. I asked this question many times before. That situation undermines the kind of work we around this table try to do for our constituents who depend on us to stand up for them and say their piece. They do not get to say it too often.

I am a little uneasy. I have been watching this carefully. I have dealt with countless cases involving AIB so I am speaking from actual coalface experience. I am not saying the information the representatives gave is wrong. I am saying there is sometimes a tendency to read the script, which tells you what it tells you and nothing more. I will conclude because I must go to the House and am overdue. Suffice to say, it is essential the general public, when somebody is writing off a debt of hundreds of thousands, or multiples of that, is told and knows what is being written off. People come to me and say, "How did that guy get that kind of deal?", when theirs was only a small debt and minuscule in comparison with that. The public have to be told what is happening. A write-off of an uncollectible debt has to be clearly illustrated to the general public or else-----