Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)
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I welcome the witnesses. I cannot quite grasp what Mr. Tobin means by "culture". It sounds very nice but my experience is that a financial institution is usually a very powerful one and individual customers, whether a single person taking out his or her first mortgage or a couple buying a house, are very much at a disadvantage.

Years ago, the culture was such that a person could barely get an application form from institutions. It is still very difficult. I would like to see a customer champion in banks, somebody who is on the customer's side, in respect of communication and ease of comprehension. People are making the biggest investment of their lives for a significant part of their adult life, that is, for 25 to 35 years or more. When I meet people for whom things have gone wrong, I often wonder whether somebody in the bank at the time should perhaps have advised the person that the burden they were taking on was going to be significant for them and their family. That does not seem to happen. Back in the 2000s I argued that people with a consumer debt background should be appointed to the panels in the regulatory structure. Have the officials formed a view on how to address this?

A culture of financial numeracy could be brought into schools to give children some knowledge of the framework. Some schools do it but many do not. As banking moves increasingly online, the visible presence of familiar banking institutions is on the wane in towns or suburbs as most banking is done remotely. Have the officials thought about how that might be addressed to try to balance the scale between the bank and the customer? This would be very much in the interests of the financial institution because it wants successful borrowers who enter into a loan arrangement they are likely to be able to maintain and will want to maintain because they understand what the relationship is about. It is a commercial relationship. There is a significant return to the bank if the lenders are successful, if it has chosen its lenders properly.

I was very involved in promoting the Rebuilding Ireland home loans initiative. I do not know if the Department was involved in that. My local council, Fingal County Council, has stopped taking any more loans. There is enormous population growth in its area, that is, the north of Dublin county and Dublin 15, and house prices there have rocketed.

I worry that the drift to professional landlords buying the bulk of available properties off the drawing board affects the supply of feasible mortgages for the traditional mortgagees who could be two civil servants, at executive officer or assistant principal officer level, committing to 25 years. Has the Department considered the long-term implications of that in terms of culture, given the inflation in houses and how banks may be funding big commercial landlords rather than individuals?

Has the Department considered what the long-term cultural implications of that are? Does it still see banks as being likely to provide mortgage lending to individual customers on middle and lower incomes? I have in mind two civil servants who have been the public service for between eight and ten years, who have earned a few increments and may have been promoted once or twice. The way everything is going, it will be increasingly difficult for such people to buy as they are being squeezed out by the banks' other customers. In cultural terms, these matters have profound implications for people.