Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)
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To follow up on that, how is this manifested? How does a consumer find out whether or not the service the consumer is getting from a bank is more or less expensive than other banks? It is extremely difficult to compare them. How are consumers represented in the process in the Central Bank? How many representatives of consumers are there? I include small and medium enterprises, SMEs, as "consumers" because the people who often get the roughest deal are SMEs looking for loans and seeking to buy credit for varying durations and finding that if they enter into a deal and something is varied, the cost can rise enormously. How are consumers represented, particularly at a time when face-to-face banking relationships are disappearing from a consumer and small business point of view? It has moved to online banking and there is nothing wrong with that but it can be expensive to meet, speak to or contact somebody. What is the response of the Central Bank and its European colleagues? The impression there, which many people believe, is that because Irish banks collapsed, the role of the Central Bank has been to bring the banks back to a point of prudential security, safety and that at the same time consumers, a term which I use widely as I set it out, are gouged with charges, penalties and costs. This even happens in the case of simple things.

The Central Bank instructed banks to confirm who account holders are, which is ongoing. That can be extraordinarily difficult from the point of view of consumers because banks come out with a bewildering range of things that people have to confirm with regard to the accounts. Is there somewhere that banks can go? Does the Central Bank have any contact with services such as the Citizens Information Board or the Money Advice and Budgeting Services, or indeed with credit unions where many people have sought recourse? I do not think credit unions fit into this section. Is there an easy way of explaining it? If somebody has a serious complaint, does that person still have to go through all the bank processes or can he or she get relatively quickly to some kind of Ombudsman service where action may be required sooner rather than later? Many people give up on complaining because it is a lengthy process which takes a lot of personal resource on the part of people to be able to deal with it.