Mr. Padraic Kissane:

I call fraud the "F" word. I have been asked a number of time whether I considered the issue of fraud, but of course, the desire from the outset was to restore the tracker rate for customers. I can tell the bank within two minutes whether a client is entitled to a tracker mortgage. I can tell it the rate and the calculations and I have no access to the bank's systems. One can multiply that by the figures in my estimation that have been impacted. If the accounts of everybody who is impacted and should be corrected is corrected, I think the figures will approach 30,000 accounts. I purposely use the words "accounts" again because of the numbers of people affected. The Minister for Finance is affected by what the banks did. He is trying to get recovery. One is talking about a large cohort of the taxpayers overpaying sums ranging from €600, €700, €1,000,€1,200 and €1,500. One has to earn double this amount to pay it. If I press the button to the degree that it would have needed to be pushed, I do not believe for a minute that it would have solved anything because it would have added further delay to the process of restoring the tracker rates to customers. That is all I ever intended to do from the outset through the ombudsman's process. Initially, I was dealing directly with the banks but that was a waste of time. It is important to say that what caused this issue was the cost of money on the international markets. I was asked recently to explain what had occurred in two sentences, it is as follows. These four witnesses had control of the interest rates that the bank could charge with a tracker mortgage. When the banks hit the money market that went against them, they did everything in their power to get that control back. That is what caused it and that is what it is. To individualise that, which one would have to in a fraud case, to individuals within the banks would prove next to impossible. I know that if this happened in the United States, it would be a different scenario. I cannot, on behalf of all of the people affected, bring a class action. Such lawsuits are prevented from occurring in this country. Everything that has to happen to get a righteous outcome is the reason we have come to this committee. We are asking what we believe to be the biggest power in the country to take the action to do something. It is an important question, but it is not a question for me. The only question for me is to get the customers back on their tracker rate. That is all I ever set out to do.