Pearse Doherty (Donegal South West, Sinn Fein)

The debacle at Ulster Bank continues. This morning we heard from the managing director of branch banking at Ulster Bank, Mr. Jim Ryan, who admitted that despite earlier assurances, customers will continue to experience disruption into next week. More than 150,000 people have now been affected by this failure, which is causing enormous difficulties for families, individuals and businesses. We are almost a week into it, yet key questions remain unanswered. I ask the Minister of State to try to answer them today.

First, how did a relatively minor software upgrade lead to such widespread disruption of the bank's payments system? Second, where was the bank's disaster recovery safety net? Experts say the bank should have had a second mainframe operating at a different location, which should have kicked into action when the initial fault arose.

Third, what is to say that this kind of problem will not occur in other banks operating in this State in future? We know that in 2010, the Bank of Ireland experienced problems with its IT system. How do we know that similar system failures being experienced at Ulster Bank are not unique to that bank? Ulster Bank has not answered the questions adequately.

There also seems to have been a very slow response from the Central Bank, the Financial Regulator and the Government in getting answers to these questions. The Government, the regulator and the Ulster Bank management need to answer these questions before an Oireachtas committee. Hopefully, the Minister of State can shed some light on this matter for us and, more importantly, for the 150,000 people who have been affected by this problem so far. There are hundreds of thousands of customers with other banks in this State who are worried it could potentially affect them also.

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