Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank Fianna Fáil for tabling this motion and I welcome the opportunity to make a quick contribution to the debate. It is significant that yesterday it was announced that the former Taoiseach, Deputy Kenny, has joined the distinguished Speakers Associates agency of London as an after-dinner speaker at €22,000 a talk. This captures what Fine Gael and to some extent Fianna Fáil - on the occasion of this motion I agree with it - are about, namely, talk and more talk. The banks did this because they got away with it and they knew that the tracker mortgages were good for their customers but not good for the profits of the banks, so they decided they would change that. We hear talk of the culture not having changed. The word is not "culture". That is a misuse of language. What the banks have done is wrong, in my opinion, criminally wrong, and there should be a serious Garda investigation into it. At the very least what we should have from the Government tonight is a serious report from the Central Bank and the Financial Services Ombudsman on what they have found to date, setting out what legislation is necessary if the current law is not strong enough and, if it is strong enough, why it has not been used. However, the Central Bank tells us that moral suasion should ultimately sway the banks to do the right thing and the Financial Services Ombudsman tells us he is very disappointed by the conduct of the banks. These are the banks that we bailed out. We talk about the €64 billion as if it were monopoly money and the blanket bank guarantee on 30 September and so on.

I have one minute left and I would like to use it on behalf of those people who have lost their homes, their health and, on occasion, their lives because of the absolutely criminal behaviour of the banks. A serious question must be answered about the role of the public interest directors on these banks. What are they doing? A serious question must also be asked about the banks themselves, two of which we substantially own. They have done this in our name, but I say clearly that they have not done it in my name. What they have done is criminally wrong. I ask exactly what Sinn Féin has asked. Deputy Pearse Doherty has asked at the very least for a weekly report on the progress being made by the banks. I ask the Minister for a written report on the progress of a Garda investigation into what appears to be out-and-out criminal activity and theft. Not too long ago the Taoiseach, when he was the Minister for Social Protection, ran a campaign on the sides of buses asking people to come forward with information on people cheating the system. Perhaps the Minister could run a similar campaign now on all the buses throughout all the cities for the benefit of those who were excluded from tracker mortgages when they were entitled to them or put on the wrong rates, asking them to come forward. Why does the Minister not run such a campaign if the Government is genuinely serious about tackling what is being wrongly described as "culture"?

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