Mr. Brian Hayes:

It is an industry issue if people are not satisfied with a response. They might not always agree, and there are always two sides to a story, but there is an industry responsibility to respond to that. We attended a Central Bank of Ireland round table with banks, non-banks and credit servicing firms in June of this year. I know the Central Bank has gone into a strong and invasive assessment of all of the cases in the credit servicing firms. As I said, those tools, MARP and CCMA, are applicable to credit servicing firms. It is not acceptable that people receive that kind of response, be it a public representative acting on behalf of a constituent or the customer. That is why we have developed the MARP and MABS tools with them.

I will give the Cathaoirleach an example of where the role of a credit servicing firm was critical. Mr. Crowley spoke about payment breaks. When Covid happened the first request from the Central Bank of Ireland, after the Department of Finance had spoken to us about putting the scheme together, was to ask the credit servicing firms to follow the banks on this. They did so. They are a part of the industry. They hold 80,000 mortgages and see people in significant distress. In a sense, their range of solutions has to be tailored to that but it is important that they respond. I am sure each of the CEOs of the credit servicing firms would not be happy, just as none of our banks or non-bank lenders would be happy, if that is the response people are getting. I am happy to articulate that view.