Mr. Paul Joyce:

Those are the terms and conditions. Financial agreements are generally pre-drafted on behalf of the institution in question. There is a considerable amount of small print and people enter into these agreements without fully understanding what they involve. The National Consumer Agency has been quite helpful in providing information on its website and so on, but people do not always have access to the Internet. There is a set of regulations, the European Communities (Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts) Regulations, which can be used by consumers to point to unfair pre-drafted terms in contracts. That is something that might be looked at and the National Consumer Agency is quite active in that regard. People can seek to have an order made that a term in an agreement is unfair because it is deliberately imbalanced against the interests of the consumer.

There is also an issue relating to life assurance and mortgage arrears because people are entering into rescheduled agreements and either their mortgage protection has lapsed or they have not readjusted their mortgage protection policies.