Lenders that harass debtors must be named - Cassidy

SEANAD REPORT:FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS and individuals acting on their behalf would be named and shamed in the House if they did not desist from employing heavy-handed tactics to recover loan arrears from hard-pressed borrowers, Seanad leader Donie Cassidy warned.

Debt collectors were said to be phoning people’s places of work, indicating who they were and putting stress on those who were doing their best to make repayments. It was time such bully-boy tactics ceased, and he called on institutions using recovery agencies to stop this type of approach.

Diarmuid Wilson (FF), Government Whip, said that institutions that advanced loans were phoning debtors on an hourly basis at home and at work. There was a need to highlight this behaviour through debates in the House. It was unacceptable that those intent on collecting debts were identifying themselves to the employers of those who owed money.

The Central Bank was a model of hypocrisy because “it tells us how to behave ourselves while it behaves in a totally different way itself”, Shane Ross (Ind) said. Information about its waste of public money on trips by spouses would not have emerged but for the work of another State organ.

David Norris said they should stop “boring the knickers off the Irish people” with stories about bankers’ wives and their travels. He found this kind of muckraking mind-numbing. If there was a problem, they should identify it and move on. The country should not be demoralised with stories that were used to sell newspapers.

Eugene Regan, Fine Gael justice spokesman, called for a protocol to spell out the circumstances in which witnesses would be afforded protection in criminal cases. He noted that a witness in the Lillis trial had been shielded from the media. He thought it was right that such protection be afforded to a witness who elected to have it.