Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Let me go back to the victim in this, and the 4,000 people scammed in 2021. They did not get any compensation. They were out of pocket and that was it. They are changing the laws in Britain. The voluntary code between the ten large banks was mentioned and that is now moving to a statutory code. The consultation is finished. A policy statement has been issued by the British Government, stating that victims would be reimbursed by the industry. Online platforms and telecommunications have a responsibility there as well. There is a clear cost-benefit analysis in this. The regulator has looked at this in detail. It has suggested this would push down the level of approved push payment fraud in Britain. The view of the industry is that this obviously puts cost on its members. The members are the banks. What is the view of the industry on introducing similar legislation here? From reading the British cost-benefit analysis, I believe it has a lot of benefits. I acknowledge I raised this privately with BPFI. I have encountered a case where somebody who lives in the North was a victim of an authorised push payment fraud. Both bank accounts were used - one in the North and one in the South. We will pretend it is a romance scam in this case. Somebody is conned into believing they are in a romance scam. The person supposedly falls ill. Transactions are being made to help them. One bank account in the North has no money left in it. The one in the South starts making payments to it. In the North, all of that money is reimbursed. In the future, when this legislation passes in Britain, it is guaranteed to be reimbursed. There are set minimums, it has to be over a certain level, there can be an excess of £35 and so on. These romance scams are not €90 or £90. They are €9,000, €19,000 and €90,000 in some cases. They are huge amounts of money. In the South, she was told she has to paddle her own canoe because there is no support there. The legislation in Britain will make it mandatory on industry to reimburse those types of authorised push payment frauds. Should we not have the same here?