John McGuinness (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail)
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I am asking the Central Bank to use its powers to hold these institutions to account. There is another letter where the correspondent has been waiting for seven years. Looking at the correspondence and what is going on, it is shocking that banks do not even reply to these people. The answer is, of course, to bring back in the individual banks, and I am afraid it is something we will now have to do. There is no consistency in how they reply to the committee or their customers. I tested Bank of Ireland, writing to Mr. Boucher and asking him to examine a client's case. One bank said it cannot speak to us about individual customers, which is fine, but that it would contact the client in question. That is fair enough. Bank of Ireland gave one sentence in reply and said it could not talk to us. That is the type of attitude we are coming up against from banks. I have said they are growing more arrogant by the day.

The person who wrote the letter to me stated that seven years have elapsed. Earlier Deputy Burke spoke about Padraic Kissane. On 9 March, Padraic Kissane said that the deception is continuing on such a scale that it is worse it is getting rather than better. We listened to him here. In terms of the cases that he outlined, the Governor can quote us the letter of the law, which is his job, and the regulators and banks will do their business. The customers have been pushed so far from the centre of things that they do not understand the language that the bank is using against them, which is a real problem. Nobody has spelled out to the customer in layman's language exactly what the criteria is in terms of the investigation, how long they can expect to wait or given them a complete brief on where their case is and instead customers have had to fight all of the way. Some of the replies have been as follows: "When you look at your mortgage we gave you the wrong set of terms and conditions due to a manual error. Despite this error we have now decided to honour these terms and conditions." The replies make it sound like the borrowers are the guilty ones. They have been made to feel guilty and thankful that the bank has talked to them at all. I am not saying so. That message has been conveyed in the correspondence sent to everyone.