Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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I would also raise the question of finance other than domestic banks limiting our exposure., but it also has other impacts. Mr. Madouros should consider them when he is making those comments. There are clearly other impacts of that, and I am the view that they are, arguably, seriously detrimental to our ability to resolve the housing crisis.

On the consumer issues I wanted to ask about, the committee secretariat sent the Central Bank some correspondence on an issue I asked it to bring up with the officials. It is an issue that was covered in some media discussion in 2023 about the mis-selling of financial products by insurance companies, in particular the fund around which there was much controversy, that is, the global absolute return strategies, GARS, fund. I will put it in context for people who might be interested in why I am asking about this. The Government in this country encourages people to put money away for their pensions, so people do. They have savings and they go to brokers and put them into funds for their old age. One of these funds was the GARS fund. There is quite extensive coverage on it if this is not immediately familiar, but the bank did respond to our committee on it. It was sold to people as a low-risk product with a guaranteed 3% to 5% return irrespective of market conditions. Standard Life was the main organisation pushing it. Of 50 different products it had, it said it was the second lowest-risk product. It was aimed at very ordinary people - retail customers, if you like. It was marketed at them as a low-risk pension investment type product where they were guaranteed returns that were modest, but it was a low-risk product regardless of market conditions. They made very significant losses. That was covered in the press and so on at the time. The question arises as to where the regulator was in assessing how this product was being presented to retail consumers. Insurance companies said they are selling a low-risk product that in fact turned out to be a high-risk product. Some of the financial experts who looked at this said this was an incredibly complex product.

People did not really know what they were selling. Anybody who looked at it would discover it was a far higher risk than hedge funds and so on, yet it was being sold to large numbers of Irish consumers. Does the Central Bank have any idea how many people in Ireland were exposed to this? It was being sold in Britain and elsewhere but quite a large number of people made significant losses. If you invest in the market, you take risks, but the Central Bank has a role in assessing how things are sold. If they are presented as low risk and turn out to be massively high risk and products are being misrepresented to those who buy them, it seems to me that is an issue within the Central Bank's remit. Are the witnesses familiar with this story? Have they any comment on it? They replied to our-----