Seán Fleming (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The Minister’s answer confirms my original allegation that we are rewarding banks for being lazy. The Minister said it would be difficult to disaggregate loans as they are sold as a bundle. Let us put a bit of difficulty on the banks. They are paid well enough and they should be able to do a difficult job. If the essence of what the Department of Finance says is that it would not want ever to do anything that would make life difficult for a bank, then we have lost the plot entirely. We should do everything possible to assist the banks in helping the economy but we should assist them to help the public as well.

I accept loans are sold as a bundle but the people who are buying them will look at the loan book and take an estimate of how many are non-performing and where they will get very little. They will look at the loans that are performing very well and they will come in with an aggregate price. Even though the loans are not individually priced, the people who are buying them and selling them have worked out some rule of thumb as to what each of the individual loans are worth because they are not buying them just in the hope that they will make a profit. Let us put a bit of difficulty on the banks. Let us force them to disaggregate loans into much smaller groups and give individuals the opportunity to bid. The banks should put the loans out for open tender and not just as one job lot and let people make an offer. If the offer is not acceptable, at least people have been given the opportunity.

I contrast the treatment with the way NAMA has been treated. When it bought a loan at a discount, for example, in the case of a loan sold to NAMA for €35 million, it would boast forever and a day if it got €40 million for the loan and made a profit. NAMA does not go after the full original value of a loan. It is happy if it gets above the discounted value it paid for it, and it brags that it made a profit. The same principle should apply to mortgage loans. Let us make life a little bit difficult for the banks when it comes to dealing with customers because they are the ones who pay and they are entitled to be treated as individuals, not as a job lot.

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