Marie Louise O'Donnell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

It must have been a huge bustle he was walking past.

On a serious note, I would like the Minister for Finance, Deputy Noonan, to come to the House and explain to me how Bank of Ireland is continuing to do to the people what it did during the banking crisis. Edgar Allen Poe wrote a short story entitled The Fall of the House of Usher, and one could align it to the fall of the house of banking in 2008 in which we, the Irish people, had to pay back €65 billion of private debts, creating an enormous albatross. At the same time, the Bank of Ireland is telling its customers they will have to pay more to withdraw cash, pay in cash and use cheques. The same practices are happening in an individual, insidious way as in 2008.

There is an excellent banking inquiry under way with people coming from all over the world to tell us about our own-goals, Kalashnikovs to the kidneys and what we did and did not do. Every day, something new is coming from the banks to ostracise people. Human beings are no longer needed or spoken to in banks. Only if people play the banks' games their way, the automatic, technological way, will the banks answer them. While it is all right for small businesses, most Irish people deal with the banks individually with their cash. I would like the Minister to come here and tell us what smacht, to use the Irish word for order, is being put on Irish banks, especially Bank of Ireland, to prevent them from carrying on and doing what they like to the Irish people while we are still saving them and keeping them open because they have not got a penny to their names, except what the Canadians gave them.