Ms Maeve Mullin:

I thank the Cathaoirleach and members for the opportunity to outline how Finders International assists with the process of identifying and locating owners of property held in safe deposit boxes by financial institutions. Our offices here in Dublin are located on Sir John Rogerson’s Quay and we also have offices in London, Edinburgh and Hull. We work with a network of researchers and agents worldwide.

The research work we carry out is on behalf of solicitors, county councils, pension providers, hospitals, nursing homes and private individuals. For solicitors, we locate beneficiaries named in a will and, for intestate cases, we provide full family trees where all entitled relatives are identified. We also carry out property research for legal professionals for adverse possession and first registration cases. Since 2017, we have been working with Irish county councils to identify and locate the owners of vacant and derelict properties so that the councils can proceed with the compulsory purchase order, CPO, process or prompt sale of the property to bring it back into housing supply. Nine times out of ten, the local county council knows the identity of the owner is and can make contact with him or her but we come into play for the awkward cases where the owner and his or her current address is unknown.

On behalf of pension providers we locate pension holders who have stopped responding to correspondence from the pension provider. This may be because the person has passed away or moved to a nursing home. It may be because the person has moved address, the pension company has not been updated with the new address and the person's post is not being forwarded. Our part in this process enables the pension providers to fulfil their obligations under legislation to make all reasonable efforts to locate pension holders.

As a result of requests from Irish hospitals and nursing homes, we have located next-of-kin for deceased patients, which allows for their funerals to proceed without delay and for funerals to be in accordance with the deceased person's wishes or his or her family's wishes.

We carry out research on behalf of private individuals who wish to apply for an Irish passport but who need genealogical research done in order to have the birth, marriage and death documents that prove their link back to their Irish ancestor.

We have in the past assisted an Irish financial institution to successfully locate owners of a small number of safe deposit boxes; however, that bank has now left the Irish market and did not continue with its process of locating owners. In those cases the descendants of the owners of the safe deposit boxes that were located were delighted to hear from us. They had no idea or knowledge of the safe deposit box their ancestor had and they were very grateful to have been contacted. We then passed their contact details back to the bank and it made further arrangements to reunite the contents with their rightful owners.

The initial information we were given on the safe deposit boxes was the name of the owner as per the records the financial institution held, his or her address at that time, the date or the approximate date on which the safe deposit box was opened or last accessed and any other details regarding the box owner - for example, occupation, employer's name, the names of any relatives or any other information that gives us a bit more to go on. Depending on the information available, we can tailor the research required for each case.

Rather than leaving safe deposit boxes unopened and unclaimed, it is a success for everybody to have them opened and their owners located. The rightful owners are usually more interested in their ancestors and in the items contained in the box than in the monetary value of the items. Financial institutions get to reclaim space used for storage, and it would be wonderful if some of the items from these safe deposit boxes could go on display in our museums and galleries for the benefit of everybody.

We at Finders are very proud of our Guaranteed Irish accreditation. We were thrilled to win the accolade of business all-star probate genealogists of the year 2023 from the All-Ireland Business Foundation, and we are delighted to be nominated for service provider to the legal profession for 2023. Those awards will come up in June. It is the best compliment a firm can get to be given a testimonial from a client, and we are very grateful for the many testimonials received from solicitors, county councils and beneficiaries.

To recap, we are a professional research firm specialising in Irish genealogical and property research and are very well placed to assist in identifying and locating the owners of safe deposit boxes. This is something we have experience of. We would very much appreciate the opportunity to be involved in and to contribute to such a great initiative. I thank the committee for its kind attention.