Eoin Butler's Q&A

JAMES TREACY, managing director of Stubbs Gazette, on checking the country's collective bank balance

How many people are employed at Stubb's Gazette? About 40. Our main business is credit checking, but we also do debt recovery for credit unions, banks, utility companies and credit providers.

It's an ill wind that blows nobody any good. How many were employed here in 2006/07? Maybe 10. But credit was much more freely available back then, so there was a much bigger volume of credit checks to be done.

Were those checks being heeded?Yes, but some of our biggest clients were subprime lenders. Ordinarily, if you have a bad credit rating, you don't get a loan. It was the opposite with the subprime lenders. If they saw that you had a bad credit rating – a really bad one – they would give you the loan, but increase the interest rate significantly.

They must have known these loans would go pear-shaped. So why give them out? The whole model was predicated on the notion that they would get the mortgages in the door, repackage the mortgage book and then flog it to some unsuspecting punter in America or Hong Kong. Bad money was following bad. It was like musical chairs.

You're essentially running an intelligence gathering operation here. How does it work?Every day we get an upload of electronic files from the Companies Registration Office. That data is shipped abroad for processing, the numbers get crunched into a template and sent back to us.

What about legal rulings?We have four correspondents who travel around the district courts. Most of the courts aren't computerised, so our correspondents literally have to go through the casebook and manually record that information. The Law Society is another source. We keep a record of any solicitors who have been censured or disqualified. In all, we have about 50 or 60 sources of data.

A listing in Stubbs Gazette was once a great source of shame. Is there still the same stigma attached?That's not for me to say. But lots of well known names have appeared in these pages: Oscar Wilde, James Joyce's father John Stanislaus Joyce, right up to Samantha Mumba and Twink. Famously, James O'Reilly became the first cabinet minister ever to be listed in the Gazette earlier this year.

Growing up, was it always your dream to publicly name and shame people in financial difficulty? Was it always your dream to be a journalist?

Well, touché. Look at it this way. An Irish holiday company went belly up recently and they left thousands of families in the lurch. This company took money from people right up until the day they ceased trading. They accepted cheques but not credit card payments, so those punters are wiped out now. That’s fraud, as far as I’m concerned. Our mission is to expose people like that.

Surely there are also decent people in here who've just fallen on hard times?Absolutely. In debt collection, the first thing we're trained to do is to differentiate between those who can't pay and those who won't pay. In genuine cases, we'd go back to our client and inform them that there's no point in pursuing this person. In three months, maybe their circumstances will have changed.

How do you decide that someone isn't genuine?We get a statement of affairs from them. Once, a couple who owed €400 on a telephone bill admitted to having a monthly disposable income of €4,000. They claimed to have transport costs of €900 a month, €200 a month for savings, €90 for lottery tickets . . . and so on. They offered to pay €5 a month on the debt. That's the kind of thing we have to deal with on a daily basis.

Have you seen the most recent Batman film?No, I'm afraid to go to the cinema after what happened in the US.

Anne Hathaway's character is a cat burglar who is looking for a device that will wipe her record clean and wash away her sins. Does anything like that exist in real life?Well, paying your bills is a good start. Beyond that, it depends on the bank. The Data Protection Commissioner's opinion is that anything that happened more than six years ago should not be held against you. That doesn't mean they don't keep a record of it. That doesn't mean they can't refer to it. But they shouldn't consider it as part of a loan application.

So if someone defaulted on a mortgage, say, and went to Australia for six years, when they came back their record would be clean?If a judgment is made against you, there's a statute of limitations of five years on that judgment. But if they haven't done anything with that judgment, the financial institution might choose to re-register for another five years. So there's no hard and fast rule I'm afraid.