Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

This was brought in back in 2017 to make life easy. I have experience of having to pay suppliers from my involvement in a community group. In this day and age, we are having to take a screenshot to show we have made a payment and send the screenshot to the supplier via WhatsApp, all because the banks here do not operate instant payments.

As I have said, what other banks have done in all those other countries is operate instant payments. There are 220,000 banks, none of which are in Ireland and, therefore, if someone is paying a supplier, the or she is not able to see that it is actually in the bank account. That has been the case since 2017. What is the Central Bank doing from a consumer point of view? Would it not ask them whether they would be better off investing in technology to apply instant payments, which banks across the EU are doing, instead of spending their profits on share buybacks or increased dividends for their shareholders?