Michael McGrath (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail)

This has developed into a complete mess over the last two weeks. Yesterday, the Central Bank came before the finance committee and, today, Ulster Bank came before the committee and confirmed that more than 500,000 customers of the bank in Ireland have been directly affected by this debacle. It still has a backlog of 4 million transactions to clear and its latest update, as the Minister knows, is that by the week beginning 16 July it hopes the vast majority of customers will have a normal service. Therefore, four weeks after the incident first occurred, not all customers will have full access to normal banking services. It is completely unacceptable and a scandal.

From a regulatory point of view, one issue that arose during the course of the hearing yesterday was that the Central Bank confirmed it does not have the IT expertise to go in and interrogate the IT systems in the banks. In its own words, the Central Bank "has instructed all banks ... to review their contingency plans and to formally reconfirm that a robust recovery capability is in place." Essentially, the Central Bank is asking the banks to review their own plans and systems and confirm that they think everything is in order. That is the type of regulatory approach that contributed to the mess we got into and it needs to change. There needs to be far more active engagement. The Central Bank should be arranging for teams to go into the banks and actually test the systems instead of relying on what the banks are telling it.

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