Joint Committee on Social Protection, Community and Rural Development and the Islands díospóireacht -
Wednesday, 31 May 2023

Safe Deposit Boxes and Related Deposits Bill 2022: Discussion (Resumed)

An Cathaoirleach

Members participating in the meeting remotely are required to do so from within the precincts of the Leinster House complex only. I ask members and witnesses to please turn off their mobile phones or ensure they are on silent mode. I advise members of the committee who are participating in the meeting remotely to use the raise hand function on Microsoft Teams if they wish to contribute.

This is the committee's second session of detailed scrutiny of the Safe Deposits Boxes and Related Deposits Bill 2022. This Private Member's Bill tabled by Deputy Ó Cuív concerns abandoned safe deposit boxes residing in some of the oldest banks still in operation today. The Bill comprises six Parts and 30 sections, addressing, among other items, the registration of deposits, the retention by the State of unclaimed property, notification of relevant institutions such as the National Gallery or the National Library and the disposal or transfer of unclaimed property and moneys. The Oireachtas Joint Committee on Community and Rural Development first looked at this issue in March 2019. It is clear that some of the issues raised in that debate on abandoned safe deposit boxes have been addressed in Deputy Ó Cuív's Private Member's Bill. The Bill was first introduced in May 2022 and has now reached pre-Committee Stage scrutiny.

Many of the issues raised with the Departments last week related to the scope and drafting of the Bill. Today, we will engage with Finders International, which works to assist with the process of identifying and locating owners for property held in safe deposit boxes by financial institutions on behalf of solicitors, county councils, pension providers, hospitals, nursing homes and private individuals. We look forward to discussing the Bill, its impact on the public and how the committee can best incorporate the views into the detailed scrutiny process to assist with and improve the Bill.

I welcome from Finders International Ireland Ms Maeve Mullin, director, and Ms Lorna Fleming, private client manager. I extend the sympathy of the committee to the family, relatives, friends and colleagues of Mr. Brendan O'Donoghue of Finders International, who gave a lot of time and effort to the issue we are considering today. I acknowledge his role and think of his relatives at this difficult time.

Before we begin, I wish to explain some limitations to parliamentary privilege and the practice of the Houses as regards references witnesses may make to other persons in their evidence. The evidence of witnesses physically present or who give evidence from within the parliamentary precincts is protected pursuant to both the Constitution and statute by absolute privilege. Witnesses are reminded of the long-standing parliamentary practice that they should not criticise or make charges against any person or entity by name or in such a way as to make him, her or it identifiable, or otherwise engage in speech that might be regarded as damaging to the good name of the person or entity. Therefore, if their statements are potentially defamatory in relation to an identifiable person or entity, they will be directed to discontinue their remarks. It is imperative that they comply with any such direction.

Members are reminded of the long-standing parliamentary practice to the effect that they should not comment on, criticise or make charges against a person outside the Houses or an official either by name or in such a way as to make him or her identifiable.

I invite Ms Mullin to make her opening statement.

Ms Maeve Mullin

I thank the Cathaoirleach and members for the opportunity to outline how Finders International assists with the process of identifying and locating owners of property held in safe deposit boxes by financial institutions. Our offices here in Dublin are located on Sir John Rogerson’s Quay and we also have offices in London, Edinburgh and Hull. We work with a network of researchers and agents worldwide.

The research work we carry out is on behalf of solicitors, county councils, pension providers, hospitals, nursing homes and private individuals. For solicitors, we locate beneficiaries named in a will and, for intestate cases, we provide full family trees where all entitled relatives are identified. We also carry out property research for legal professionals for adverse possession and first registration cases. Since 2017, we have been working with Irish county councils to identify and locate the owners of vacant and derelict properties so that the councils can proceed with the compulsory purchase order, CPO, process or prompt sale of the property to bring it back into housing supply. Nine times out of ten, the local county council knows the identity of the owner is and can make contact with him or her but we come into play for the awkward cases where the owner and his or her current address is unknown.

On behalf of pension providers we locate pension holders who have stopped responding to correspondence from the pension provider. This may be because the person has passed away or moved to a nursing home. It may be because the person has moved address, the pension company has not been updated with the new address and the person's post is not being forwarded. Our part in this process enables the pension providers to fulfil their obligations under legislation to make all reasonable efforts to locate pension holders.

As a result of requests from Irish hospitals and nursing homes, we have located next-of-kin for deceased patients, which allows for their funerals to proceed without delay and for funerals to be in accordance with the deceased person's wishes or his or her family's wishes.

We carry out research on behalf of private individuals who wish to apply for an Irish passport but who need genealogical research done in order to have the birth, marriage and death documents that prove their link back to their Irish ancestor.

We have in the past assisted an Irish financial institution to successfully locate owners of a small number of safe deposit boxes; however, that bank has now left the Irish market and did not continue with its process of locating owners. In those cases the descendants of the owners of the safe deposit boxes that were located were delighted to hear from us. They had no idea or knowledge of the safe deposit box their ancestor had and they were very grateful to have been contacted. We then passed their contact details back to the bank and it made further arrangements to reunite the contents with their rightful owners.

The initial information we were given on the safe deposit boxes was the name of the owner as per the records the financial institution held, his or her address at that time, the date or the approximate date on which the safe deposit box was opened or last accessed and any other details regarding the box owner - for example, occupation, employer's name, the names of any relatives or any other information that gives us a bit more to go on. Depending on the information available, we can tailor the research required for each case.

Rather than leaving safe deposit boxes unopened and unclaimed, it is a success for everybody to have them opened and their owners located. The rightful owners are usually more interested in their ancestors and in the items contained in the box than in the monetary value of the items. Financial institutions get to reclaim space used for storage, and it would be wonderful if some of the items from these safe deposit boxes could go on display in our museums and galleries for the benefit of everybody.

We at Finders are very proud of our Guaranteed Irish accreditation. We were thrilled to win the accolade of business all-star probate genealogists of the year 2023 from the All-Ireland Business Foundation, and we are delighted to be nominated for service provider to the legal profession for 2023. Those awards will come up in June. It is the best compliment a firm can get to be given a testimonial from a client, and we are very grateful for the many testimonials received from solicitors, county councils and beneficiaries.

To recap, we are a professional research firm specialising in Irish genealogical and property research and are very well placed to assist in identifying and locating the owners of safe deposit boxes. This is something we have experience of. We would very much appreciate the opportunity to be involved in and to contribute to such a great initiative. I thank the committee for its kind attention.

An Cathaoirleach

Thank you, Ms Mullin, for your opening statement. I will start with Deputy Ó Cuív.

Deputy Éamon Ó Cuív

This is very interesting, and I thank the witnesses for the presentation. The requirement in the proposed Bill is that the banks make their best endeavours, and there are procedures laid down as to how they must do so, which include public advertisement and so on. However, it is not specified what those are any more than it is specified in the dormant accounts legislation.

That leads me onto my first question. Did banks ever approach Finders trying to locate the owners of dormant accounts?

Ms Maeve Mullin

No. We have not done any research to locate the owners of dormant accounts in Ireland. I believe that some work has been done on that in the UK, but not in Ireland.

Deputy Éamon Ó Cuív

That is interesting because dormant accounts are accounts that have shown no activity for 15 years or more, and it is a lot easier to locate somebody from, say, 15 years back. Money comes in every year, so the 15 years keeps moving forward. I am always amazed there is any money coming in at this stage, but there is. A lot of it then gets reclaimed, but there is a net amount coming in every year. I was wondering had the banks been involved but, obviously, they had not come to Finders.

Ms Maeve Mullin

We would be delighted to assist with that also. It is very similar research.

Deputy Éamon Ó Cuív

My second question is as follows. I am again just curious. Was Finders ever asked by Tailte Éireann, into which the Property Registration Authority merged, to track down owners in cases involving commonage, somebody who has died intestate and in respect of whom the folio is three generations old or that kind of thing? I had one case in Inishbofin where a commonage was bought and I think it took some of the people up to 20 years to rectify their title. It does not take long between a grandparent or greatgrandparent and down. I would say every Deputy here has come across such a nightmare scenario.

An Cathaoirleach

Thankfully, we do not have a huge amount of commonage.

Deputy Éamon Ó Cuív

We do.

Ms Maeve Mullin

It is not from Tailte Éireann that we get those requests; it is from-----

Deputy Éamon Ó Cuív

The solicitors.

Ms Maeve Mullin

-----the solicitors who are trying to correct title on behalf of their client. That can be the first registration where the client is possibly a granddaughter or grandson of whoever's name is on the title and the solicitor is making good that title. Yes, we do that work-----

Deputy Éamon Ó Cuív

Indirectly.

Ms Maeve Mullin

Yes. The Property Registration Authority will revert to the solicitor with a list of requirements and things that need to be done in order to make good the title, regularly doing more research in terms of contacting adjacent property owners and property owners who no longer live there and figuring out who their rightful descendants are.

Deputy Éamon Ó Cuív

Let us say I claim that I am the rightful descendant of whomever. Do I understand rightly that if somebody claims that, Finders then helps that person to create the links that would establish that as being a fact?

Ms Maeve Mullin

We do the due diligence research to make sure that it is the correct person. Éamon Ó Cuív is such a good name from a genealogical point of view, but if it is somebody who had a very popular name, we have to make sure we are speaking to the correct Patrick Murphy and not another Patrick Murphy. That is part of the due diligence research.

There are always two sides to research in that there is the desk research and the records and making sure that all the records add up to the story, and then there is the anecdotal information from the family.

Sometimes those can be at odds but all of the jigsaw pieces have to fit together.

Deputy Éamon Ó Cuív

This is the challenge, of course, because we are talking about starting in the late 18th century, and the number of generations makes it a bit more complex.

Ms Maeve Mullin

We consider that a challenge.

Deputy Éamon Ó Cuív

I know that. It is a challenge and every generation that we go back, it gets more complex. After these hearings, we will go back over the Bill, line by line. It seems to me that the legal responsibility is already provided for in the Bill, and the banks have to go looking. We have specified to a certain degree how they have to go looking but it is no more than the dormant accounts. Then, if they hire private people to do that work thoroughly for them, that would be a commercial decision of theirs. This is useful for us and also helps to flag that there are people like this doing this work. As I said, I was slightly curious about the banks and why they never made contact in regard to dormant accounts, which is easy-peasy now compared to the challenge in regard to this piece of legislation, particularly in its early years. We are proposing to start with the oldest first because the challenges and difficulties, given the learning we can do in the early phases, would be less and we can work forward. We would expect there will be more claims and more identifiable people as we work forward, so we are saying that we should look at the very interesting older stuff first. That also means we can refine our processes as we go along.

I thank Ms Mullin for coming in. I certainly think it is worth having this session to tease out the role of Finders, who it works for and so on.

An Cathaoirleach

I have a related question. I know that Finders operates in the UK as well. What has been the experience of Finders in terms of its dealings with the financial institutions in the UK? Deputy Ó Cuív has identified that it has not had a huge amount of dealings with the financial institutions here in terms of the witnesses’ evidence this morning on safety deposit boxes, except for one institution, and has had no dealings with the financial institutions here in terms of dormant accounts. What has been its level of engagement, or the level of engagement of people in the profession, with the financial institutions in the UK? Have they been more proactive in trying to seek the owners of dormant accounts? Have they been more proactive in trying to seek the ownership of safe deposit boxes? Is there a differential in terms of the procedures that are employed by the financial institutions here compared to the UK?

Ms Maeve Mullin

“Yes” is the short answer. There does seem to be more proactivity coming from the UK financial institutions in this regard. In the Irish office, where we would come into that work is where, say, somebody has a dormant account in the UK, they have passed away, they do not have any next-of-kin in the UK, but it is known that they were Irish, or their parents were Irish. That is where we get involved in that research in that we are searching for Irish descendants of the person who had the dormant account or the safe deposit box in the UK. I do not know enough to answer the question properly but we can find out.

An Cathaoirleach

I am not trying to put Ms Mullin under pressure but it would be useful to the committee to know what is the experience of Finders in terms of its dealing with the UK financial institutions. Is it because there is a different legal responsibility on them or is it that they just have different procedures there? It would be useful to the committee in the context of the consideration of this legislation to know what the driving forces are in the UK in this regard.

Second, naturally enough, the costs involved vary depending on the work that Finders has to do and it has to be remunerated in regard to that. Has Finders used the Land Commission records to any great extent? I gave evidence in the House recently regarding a neighbour of mine, Pat Shine, who registered his own family plot of bog. He had to get 280 pages in 96 documents to submit to the Property Registration Authority to register the bog in his brother's name. He has done this for a number of neighbours on one bog. This is a huge problem right across the country. The point he made to me was that the process of doing that would have been dramatically simplified for him if the Land Commission records were digitised. In terms of the work that Finders is doing, would having access to digitised records in the Land Commission reduce the overall cost for estates or families in producing these particular records? Is it or is it not another case for the digitisation of these particular records?

Ms Maeve Mullin

The quick answer is “Yes”. Digitisation is always helpful. There are a few different sets of land records that we would refer to. We go and physically visit the repositories, for example, the Valuation Office. I know there is a digitisation process that has started in the Valuation Office because it is not always the physical “land cancelled” books that we would be viewing. It has some of them that have been digitised and they are on PCs in the Valuation Office on Abbey Street but they are not online and people need to go in there to access them. The Registry of Deeds on Henrietta Street is Ms Fleming's happy place - she loves it.

Ms Lorna Fleming

I love big, dusty books. For that sort of manual searching, certainly up to 1970, people manually had to search all of the books. The challenge is that changes in ownership are registered by the lessor - the person who is transferring the property - and if you do not know what that person's name is, it is quite challenging to find the memorials or records that are there. The person selling the property may not necessarily be the property owner and it could be their son or daughter or the executor of the estate, which may not be a family member, so some of those searches can be quite challenging. That is why, if you are searching for something and you just cannot find it, you have to look at the big picture and look at the probate records to try to determine who it might be, what the different names might be and the variations.

An Cathaoirleach

Ms Fleming spoke about probate, Henrietta Street and the Registry of Deeds but she did not mention travelling to Portlaoise. That is the question I am asking. Even getting access to the records is the issue.

Ms Maeve Mullin

We have never got access to the Land Commission records in Portlaoise. My understanding was that they were not available.

An Cathaoirleach

It is quite difficult to access them but they are public records.

The frustrating thing about them is that, being public records, they should be available. The difficulty is that because of what happened in the War of Independence and the Civil War – we had a commemoration last Sunday – a large number of other records are missing. The Land Commission records are probably the most intact records we have, yet they are not publicly available, even to sort through the dusty books or to have them digitised. This makes the job of the witnesses more difficult and expensive. Ultimately, the cost is borne by the families who are trying to get their land registered or to gain access to whatever their inheritance may be.

Deputy Éamon Ó Cuív

Historically, they are very important.

Ms Maeve Mullin

They are. We would absolutely love to travel to Portlaoise. A digitisation project will take time, but if we could be given access to the records in Portlaoise – yes, please – we would be there tomorrow.

An Cathaoirleach

With that in mind, does the committee agree we should write to the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine on foot of the evidence we have heard this morning so efforts will be made to make the Land Registry records publicly accessible and so he can outline to us his plans to have them digitised and available online? Agreed.

Ms Maeve Mullin

Super. I thank the Chair.

Deputy Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire

I will be very brief because I do not have the same expertise as the other two Deputies. I said last week that, in my constituency, commonage would not be a particular issue. It is not uncommon in very old parts of city centres, such as my city, Cork, to have large numbers of unregistered properties. It is quite common to have them right in the core of a city. I am sure the guests will have come across this and will have assisted people with titles and deeds in this regard.

Would the bank that has now left the Irish market have opened the boxes and asked Finders International Ireland to do research on the basis of what it found? It would open the boxes in the first instance.

Ms Maeve Mullin

That is what it did.

Deputy Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire

I suppose that work is not common. Is the bulk of Finders International Ireland's work outside the area of safe deposit boxes?

Ms Maeve Mullin

Absolutely. The bulk of the work we do is for solicitors in respect of probate. I am referring to when a solicitor needs to distribute the estate of someone who has passed away. A person might be named in a will that the solicitor cannot find or get in touch with, or the deceased person might not have made a will at all. A solicitor often has a client who knows about one side of the deceased's family but knows nothing about the other. If a person dies intestate, the whole picture is needed. Most of the work we do relates to this. However, the process in each case is very much the same: you start with a person's name and, hopefully, an address, and ideally you will have the date of birth. Every case or inquiry we receive is different. We review each one initially and ask whether there is more information to add to the picture at the beginning. Then we figure out what records we can pick up that will start building the picture.

Deputy Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire

Let me return to the issue of safe deposit boxes and the question of whether those that have been opened are representative. What proportion of the ones opened by the bank did it ask Finders International Ireland to examine?

Ms Maeve Mullin

I do not know.

Deputy Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire

How many boxes did it ask the organisation to examine?

Ms Maeve Mullin

It asked us to examine three. I do not know how many it had opened when it decided to have us go ahead with three. I assume that some safe deposit boxes have very little in them and that others have a lot of very important material. You just do not know.

Deputy Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire

I was going to ask what was found in the boxes in the hope that they comprised a representative sample, however small. I do not know whether anyone can draw many conclusions from three boxes.

Ms Maeve Mullin

Exactly.

Deputy Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire

I suppose they give an insight into the mechanisms and the role that Finders International Ireland can play, but they do not really suggest what is likely to be in the many hundreds of other safe deposit boxes, or whatever the number is.

Ms Maeve Mullin

The bank asked us to research the three boxes, in particular, because there was money in them.

Ms Lorna Fleming

It is a question of the information. The contents of the boxes would not necessarily be shared with us. We might not be privy to that information.

The research we have carried out for pension providers to locate deferred pension members would be similar in that you might be working only from a name and date of birth or a name and address. We have a lot of experience of this type of research.

To go back to the issue of property, we had a property case involving a Murphy from Cork but we did manage to track down the family.

An Cathaoirleach

A Kelly from Roscommon.

Ms Lorna Fleming

We were very proud of that research.

Deputy Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire

That is good going, all right. Murphy and McCarthy are common names. There are six sets of McCarthys in my GAA club and none of them is related.

An Cathaoirleach

They say they are not related anyway.

Deputy Éamon Ó Cuív

I have a question. Were the boxes that were researched from the 20th century, 19th century or 18th century?

Ms Maeve Mullin

They were from the 19th century. I think they were opened in the 1800s.

Deputy Éamon Ó Cuív

Was a last date of opening given?

Ms Maeve Mullin

No.

Deputy Éamon Ó Cuív

I am just curious.

Ms Maeve Mullin

We got none of those dates, actually.

Deputy Éamon Ó Cuív

I am just curious as to whether they dated from 1920, 1880, 1850 or 1840. That is interesting.

An Cathaoirleach

All members of this committee have been very strong on trying to reinvigorate towns and villages across the country. One of the biggest challenges of local authorities is trying to track down the owners of properties. That is why, in recent times, local authorities have been engaging with organisations like Finders International Ireland.

I acknowledge this important work because many town centres and villages have premises that are a blight on the community, bearing in mind that we are in the middle of a housing crisis. Tracking down the owners of properties and having them redeveloped, through compulsory purchase or other mechanisms, is a vital community service right across the country.

I thank our guests again for their time, their engagement and the evidence they have given to the committee. We might seek additional information from them as we consider this legislation further. We look forward to their response on the evidence from the UK. We will take the issue of access to the Land Commission records up with the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine.

The joint committee went into private session at 10.20 a.m. and adjourned at 10.32 a.m. until 9.30 a.m. on Wednesday, 14 June 2023.