Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I know that. It is a challenge and every generation that we go back, it gets more complex. After these hearings, we will go back over the Bill, line by line. It seems to me that the legal responsibility is already provided for in the Bill, and the banks have to go looking. We have specified to a certain degree how they have to go looking but it is no more than the dormant accounts. Then, if they hire private people to do that work thoroughly for them, that would be a commercial decision of theirs. This is useful for us and also helps to flag that there are people like this doing this work. As I said, I was slightly curious about the banks and why they never made contact in regard to dormant accounts, which is easy-peasy now compared to the challenge in regard to this piece of legislation, particularly in its early years. We are proposing to start with the oldest first because the challenges and difficulties, given the learning we can do in the early phases, would be less and we can work forward. We would expect there will be more claims and more identifiable people as we work forward, so we are saying that we should look at the very interesting older stuff first. That also means we can refine our processes as we go along.

I thank Ms Mullin for coming in. I certainly think it is worth having this session to tease out the role of Finders, who it works for and so on.