Peter Mathews (Dublin South, Fine Gael)

It is very important that capable and experienced teams are formed in all the banking institutions to deal with mortgage loans, arrears and the restructuring of clients' situations. I visited constituents - a husband and wife - yesterday who had lived outside Dublin in a provincial town. They had good incomes but for family reasons, the illness of one of their children, they had to relocate to Dublin. They built their house in Dublin and had to take out a new loan. They had two loans and were on standard variable rates.

It was very important that the bank would respond intelligently and quickly but that is where the problem lay. The bank should have dedicated sufficiently experienced teams. It would have been a no-brainer to have been able to restructure and set out a new arrangement for those customers. Unfortunately, because of the large number of arrears and non-performing loan books which this institution had, this case was sidelined and that added to the stress. It was a double stress because of the change of location and the illness of one the children.

I use this opportunity to remind the banks to do everything they can to put in place teams of experienced people to address the problems and to restructure the loans expeditiously.

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