Brian Hayes admits "an eye was taken off the ball"

[Brendan Burgess]

Niall Brady has two article in today's Sunday Times.

Apparently since 2009, the Department of Finance has received advance notice of every rate increase by the mortgage lenders, including the 1% rate by PTSB earlier this year.

But the most interesting bit is a quote from Brian Hayes, Minister of State at the Department of Finance

...negotiations with state-owned lenders continue. It's fair to say that the implications of what was happening when the banks were increasing mortgage rates wasn't recognised. Clearly, an eye was taken off the ball.

 

[Brendan Burgess]

He is still looking firmly away from the ball, unfortunately.

At the Irish Banking Federation Mortgage Conference today, he said

We have taken a muscular approach to you (banks) on passing on the ECB interest rate reductions

I genuinely think that he just simply does not understand the irrelevance of whether a particular 0.25% rate cut was passed on or not. It's extremely frustrating.

Brendan