Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I just want to clarify this. The Commission has proposals out today. Mr. Palmer is saying it is interesting the Commission has not recommended dealing with this but that we can do it domestically. The question was whether the domestic legislatures have the power to do this. I asked this because we are fighting a battle with two hands tied behind our back with APP fraud. There are loads of issues here we will come to talk about, such as the lack of a shared database. The Commission is going to demand Mr. Palmer's colleagues in the Department of Justice get off their backsides and establish one.

I am not blaming the Department of Finance for this but it is a sad day when the European Commission directive is going to force us to do something with the banks that the authorities have been screaming for, which is to share information in real time. They are also going to have a compensation scheme. The reason I have been raising this issue and wanting to know whether we could domestically legislate for this, as other countries have done, is because we are fighting a losing battle. Authorised push payments, are in the main, not reimbursed to the customer. People are out hundreds of millions of euro. Account takeover fraud is up by 560% since 2019. Investment fraud is up 258%. Phishing, vishing and smishing are up 417%. As a legislator, I wanted to know whether we could legislate to do what other countries have done. I wanted to know if we could legislate to do confirmation of payee or do reimbursement schemes at whatever level, be that 50%, 10%, 90% or 100%. That question was not stated in my response. The question was whether it was compatible with PSD2 and I was given misleading and wrong information. That is really bad. If I have to go to the European Commission through my MEP to secure that information that I cannot get here as a Member of the Oireachtas, then there is a serious problem. Either the Department deliberately misled me in repeated responses in terms of parliamentary questions on this issue, or the Department was not aware that this could be legislated for domestically. It is one or the other,