Mr. Mark Fielding:

For a small business that has been struggling over the past five or six years to continue to exist, when one looks at the charge increases being granted, one can see interpay plus non-urgent charges for business online are going up by 150%. The smallest increase in Bank of Ireland charges is 23%. It beggars belief. I listen to all this talk about how we must make the banks profitable and that we will do so by screwing the customer but I do not hear enough about what the banks are doing to cut their costs, for example, cutting the big pensions paid to people we are paying to get rid of. In a small business, one must do both sides. One must see if one can eke an extra penny or twopence when one is getting one's sales but one is also cutting damn hard at the other end. That does not seem to be happening.

We know online transactions are less costly for the banks but when I look at the increases they are looking for, I see that all of the online charges have increased from the lowest at 42% up to 250%. These are for online transactions. If I look at the increases for paper transactions, I can see that they go from 33% to 97%. Even those charges are less than charges for online transactions. What the banks are doing is getting ready for online transactions so none of us will go to the bank to do our transactions. We will be online but we will be paying more.