Shane Ross (Independent)

That is what always happens. They will be re-appointed and, with any luck, by a different regime from Senator Leyden's. That is the pattern of experience with consumer agencies.

As an example, I will mention IFSRA, the great god of consumer agencies, which issues press releases almost every day to say what a great job it does and to issue warnings, as it did this morning about equity release. What has IFSRA ever done to discover some of the great scandals which it is so fast to step in upon when they are rumbled? IFSRA is the great publicist but did it discover the foreign exchange scandal in the banks? No, a whistleblower did. It moved fast after it had happened.

The problem with the agency established by this Bill, as with all agencies, is that it will discover nothing and then move in very late after any discovery. The institutions which are guilty of so many offences against the consumer need someone to sit on their backs. Why does the Minister not impose on the banks, which are the worst of the offenders, an external compliance officer who would act truly independently and who could move around the banks and demand at will information on their practices? Why must we always wait until someone else discovers something is wrong for the Government or the agency to move in so late in the day? It is no accident that one of the most prominent of the appointments made to the agency to which Senator Leyden referred was somebody who was very close to running a cartel in this country.

Let us look at the criticisms made of the financial services industry by independent organisations based overseas. The EU has constantly cribbed about the cartels which operate in Ireland, but the multitude of agencies which exist here have managed to do nothing about it. The cartels get away with it here, there and everywhere. The agencies have done nothing about the charges imposed by banks, stockbrokers, investment managers and auctioneers.

On this morning's Order of Business, I raised an issue pertaining to auctioneers. It is outrageous that auctioneers should be allowed even to suggest they will crucify the public by increasing their prices merely because their income is coming down when they did not reduce their prices while their income was increasing, yet that extraordinary suggestion, which in effect would entail running a cartel, was made by one of the auctioneers' bodies. As the Minister of State will attest, cartels are not operated in a formal manner, so it is difficult to catch people price fixing. Cartels are operated by people who nod and wink at each other before coincidentally and suddenly charging the same price.

What will this agency, with its politically appointed board, do to solve the problems in the auctioneering business, which crucify poor house buyers and sellers, in the stockbroking industry, whereby people are being charged outrageous fees because they know no better, in the banks, which have not been addressed by any other agency with any degree of credibility or in the investment management industry, whereby pensioners are being charged outrageous amounts by people with fewer skills than a monkey walking up a wall? We do not need an agency to solve these problems. We need someone with independence who can sit on these people's backs. We do not need the Government to continue to produce bodies which lack power or credibility to solve a political problem. This Bill will get the Government through the next six months but the scandals and overpricing will continue and the financial services will remain largely unpoliced by independent bodies.