Ms Niamh Byrne:

I drew down a mortgage with Ulster Bank in April 2006 and in July 2006, with interest rates going up, I decided to fix. I was a non-permanent teacher at the time. In 2008, when the mortgage fixed period ended, I contacted the bank and asked when I would be put back on my tracker. We were supposed to contact them. They said they were going to put me onto a variable rate. That continued and I argued with them over it for the next nine months until May 2009. In May 2009, I was on a variable rate of 3.85% with Ulster Bank and AIB had a rate of 2.5% for their variable rate. I have a master's degree in economics as well so I knew that as house prices were falling, if I went into negative equity, I would not be able to move my mortgage. My hours were severely decreased in work because of the public service moratorium so I felt I had no choice but to move the mortgage to AIB. At the time there was not really much about people moving or what had happened to people with their tracker mortgages. Talking to the bank was like talking to the desk in front of me. I rang them lots of times thinking I was creating a record by ringing them. I specifically rang them before I moved the mortgage and said to the person on the phone, "I am going to move my mortgage to AIB. Are you really not going to give me my tracker back?", and I was told "no". That was the end of that.

In 2012, I had been looking to sell my house and circumstances changed and it looked like I could rent out my apartment and buy a house. A friend brought to my attention that Ulster Bank was letting people move with their tracker, wholesale so I kind of thought, God, will I try once more. I suppose it is important to say as well that before I fixed my mortgage, I checked with the broker, rang the mortgage centre and I read through the mortgage agreement and all were emphatic that the tracker was for the life of the mortgage. Another condition on the tracker agreement was that one had to be a resident in the house. In August of 2012, I went to the ombudsman and was told that I needed a final response letter from the bank and I said okay. I went back to the bank and the bank tried to tell me at that stage that I was out of time. They tried to put it back to when I originally took out the mortgage but the breach was in 2008, so I was still in time. It went to the Financial Services Ombudsman's office and they asked if we would go to mediation. I said okay, fine and the bank resolutely refused to do so. I asked a member of staff in the ombudsman's office as well at the time how long the process would take and he laid out the process in terms of how long it would normally take and it amounted to five months. That was in October 2012 and the process did not finish until December 2014. It was delayed five times. By delayed, I mean that the process was completed, went to adjudication and five times the ombudsman had to come back for clarification and each time the clarification was from the bank not from myself.

In one of those periods, as Ms Melbourne said, there was an argument about whether I had contacted the bank or not. I produced a phone bill for the bank and said I did contact it. The individual in the bank dealing with the case came back and said, "Well you rang the redemptions line", trying to muddy the waters, as if I had been trying to move the mortgage from the very start. I came back with the form letter and I said, "There is the letter you say you sent out. What is the phone number on the inside address and what is the phone number in the paragraph of the letter telling the customer to ring?" I asked if they told all their customers to ring the redemptions line. That is the kind of carry-on that was going on throughout those two years.

In the end, by the financial ombudsman's standards I had a victory because they did say I should have reverted automatically to my tracker and they awarded me €25,000, but they did not return the tracker. Really, given the amount I would have overpaid over the life of the mortgage, €25,000 is not adequate. I could not take a case to the High Court at that stage. I was absolutely exhausted and kind of let things sit at that stage. By the following autumn the PTSB cases were very much in the news so I thought to myself what could I do. I did a data protection request on the bank and it came back with internal emails which suggested that the bank knew that I had always been entitled to my tracker and had I still been a customer, it would have returned me to my tracker, as per section 2 of my contract, but as I was no longer a customer, it was not going to do that. They also suggested that the ombudsman had no rationale in the financial decisions that they were making and that they knew that so really it was a win for the bank no matter what happened in the ombudsman's office. If I won, they were paying me less than the tracker would have cost them, which they also suggested in the email, and if I did not win then that was even better for them, so that was great. When I saw that then I went and did a data protection request on the ombudsman's office looking for my calculations. I was called by an individual in the office who told me that there were no calculations.

The person wanted to know why I was bothering with a data protection request because I had everything, to which I replied that I was entitled to do a data protection request and I put the request forward. When the Data Protection Commissioner came back to me in January 2016, it revealed that there were no calculations in the data protection documentation. I met people in the ombudsman's office, where it was confirmed to me that they have everything in front of them and they make a random decision. The attitude was that I had done a great deal better than other people. That does not restore me to the position that I should have been in and while all of this has been going on, I have been totally priced out of the market. I can do nothing.

I then started to contact the bank, stating that I had emails to the effect that I was entitled to have my contract back and requesting that it give back the contract to me. I wrote to the bank more than 40 times last year, nearly every week, and eventually the bank invited me to come before them in December 2016. I met a person from their legal department, who acted with no decorum, swaggering into the meeting with a takeaway coffee in his hand. Before the meeting I had been extremely clear with the bank stating that I was only interested in a meeting to resolve the situation, a settlement meeting. At the meeting, the bank personnel spent an hour telling me to stop writing to them. It was extremely distressing and very upsetting. I continued to write to the bank and in January I was deemed by the bank to be impacted. That was great and I let things lie until March. The Central Bank issued guidelines in March, which I think are very clear as to the particular phases. I wrote to the bank, asking them what would happen. I recognise that my case is a bit more complicated because I switched banks. They sent me back letters stating that my case is complex. I then wrote to the Central Bank, setting out what was happening, and stating that the bank was not following the guidelines. The Central Bank was very nice and sent me a letter stating that there was nothing it could do. In my response, I asked them to suggest what I should do. The Central Bank's response was that the bank is engaging with me. Technically, the bank is engaging with me - because it will respond to me every so often - but it is not telling me anything. I would not consider that to mean the bank is engaging with me.

I then applied online to request the office of the Financial Services Ombudsman to compel the bank to follow the guidelines. I did not hear anything for quite a while. When I heard back from them in June, I was told there had been problems with the online complaints system. Perhaps there was, but I am a bit cynical. I think it is funny that it would have happened in my case in particular. That office was not really quite proactive. We were in contact a number of times but a couple of weeks ago they sent me a letter stating that they will not do anything in my case until the examination is finished. That is no good to me.

Last week when Ulster Bank came before the committee I heard them say there were 1,000 customers in a situation similar to me who have not been contacted. I have been contacted purely because I have hounded them. If they have not contacted those 1,000 customers, they are not looking at how they will solve my case any time soon. Today, it is nine years, two months and 28 days since this happened. The whole of my 30s has been spent engaged in this and it looks as if there is no end to it. It has been extremely stressful. It has a significant impact on my finances. There was a suicide in my own family. If one has a direct link to suicide, the statistic is that one has a chance of one in a hundred of it happening to you. I am quite careful to look after my mental health but this situation does not in any way help that. Where is the end of it?