Jim Glennon (Dublin North, Fianna Fail)

It is a pleasure to contribute to the debate on this Bill and I congratulate the Minister of State on bringing it before the House. As a former bank official in the dim and distant past, it was always a source of some considerable curiosity to me to see the amount of money in any single bank branch which was classified as dormant. For many years before the original Dormant Accounts Act came into being, serious questions had to be answered by the financial institutions about the system of classifying accounts as dormant. Sometimes these accounts arose in an innocent and genuine manner but there were other occasions on which the genesis of the accounts might not have been clad in such lily-white clothing.

The concept behind the original Dormant Accounts Bill and this one is very solid. The disbursement of moneys towards the less well-off sections of society is entirely apt and appropriate. When one considers the amount of money involved at present — something of the order of €200 million — it brings the issue home to anyone with an interest the level of imbalance that sometimes exists between the better-off and the less well-off.

It must also be stated that it is not always the better-off whose accounts are dormant. In many cases, dormant accounts arise from a genuine oversight on the part of ordinary decent people who either forget themselves or forget to inform their families what they have. I was not paying a great deal of attention to the debate on my monitor but I heard my colleague, the Chair of the Oireachtas Committee on Arts, Sport, Tourism, Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs, Deputy Keaveney, refer to certain statements which were made by Opposition Deputies suggesting that there may be something inappropriate about the manner in which these funds are disbursed. Such a suggestion in not only fundamentally wrong and inappropriate, it does no service to the profession of politics, ourselves as politicians, our democracy or those who make such statements. While I am a relative newcomer to politics, professional politicians have been only too quick to do down an opponent for petty political advantage. We often overlook the duty that we all have to our profession and its importance to the institution of democracy.

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