Ms Helen Grogan:

I thank the committee for giving me the opportunity to speak today. I took out a 1% tracker mortgage initially with EBS to cover the mortgage on my home in 2005. It was a big mortgage with big repayments. At the time, there was a lot of competition between the banks for customers and PTSB was offering a 0.8% tracker mortgage. Normally I would not have changed for that small reduction but because it was such a big mortgage, I decided a little bit of a reduction in the interest rate would be to my benefit over the longer term of the mortgage, so I decided I was going to switch my mortgage from EBS, which was a 1% lifetime tracker, to the PTSB product, which was a 0.8% tracker. I went into the office and told the mortgage adviser about my case. I had a big mortgage and wanted to reduce my repayments as much as I could and get good value and this product seemed to answer that for me. She said this 0.8% tracker had been discounted for a year to 0.6% so it was even better value and I thought that this was great, an extra bit of money for a year.

I went through the process of switching my mortgage from EBS to PTSB for that one-year discounted tracker. At the end of that one-year period when I was expecting to get my 0.8% tracker rate, all of a sudden, I was told that my tracker rate was now 2.25%. The bank gave me options to choose from. To me, that sounded like I had been on a one-year fixed-rate product, which I would never go for because that sort of gimmick never attracted me. The bank offered a tracker of 2.25% or a variable rate, which was actually lower than the tracker rate. The tracker rate made it a much more expensive product so under duress, because I did not want the repayments to go up so high, I went for the variable rate. I complained to the bank and went through its complaints procedure. Finally, I complained to the Financial Services Ombudsman.

In the following year, that variable rate started to go up and up. The Permanent TSB variable rate went up higher than everybody else's and all of a sudden it was very high compared with what it would have been had I stayed on the higher tracker rate. I took my case to the Financial Services Ombudsman on the basis that it was mis-selling and misadvising this tracker. It was supposed to be a discounted tracker. It found against me on the basis that there was a special condition, No. 9 in the mortgage contract, that gave them permission to do this.

Then they did not sell me a discounted tracker but a one-year tracker. They did not sell me a discounted tracker because it was not discounted from anything. My understanding going into the office was that it was a 0.8% tracker that they had then discounted for the first year. That is my case and I am trying to get the 0.8% tracker restored. I have moved bank now because the variable rate went so high. Over the nine years or so that I have been on that variable rate, I have paid more than €40,000 extra in interest rate. If it continued to the end of the mortgage, it would probably be in the region of €70,000 or €80,000. That is money I cannot afford to pay and that would be far better in my pocket.

I am coming up for retirement soon and am going to have a mortgage after I retire. That was something I was trying to avoid. I had always planned to try to pay back a bit extra in order that when my retirement age came I would not have a mortgage. Now my mortgage will continue until I am 68 or 69. I am just looking for justice. I feel rage, frustration and anger that I was ripped off by the bank and duped into thinking I had a product that I could count on. It took me a couple of years to get over the fact that the ombudsman found against me. Like Ms Byrne, I did not have the energy or the finances to go to the High Court. Gradually, I had to just put it behind me and get on with things. When I heard about Mr. Kissane's success with cases in 2015, all of a sudden I realised I was not alone and not the only person to whom this has happened. It is such a disgrace that we are all made to feel responsible for making a silly or stupid decision or not getting the right advice and letting the banks ride roughshod over us. How can banks change these terms and conditions willy-nilly? Had I taken out that discounted tracker mortgage two months earlier, I would be on the 0.8% rate now. However, all of a sudden, all of the terms and conditions changed. The bank changed what a tracker mortgage means. I know what a tracker mortgage means. We all knew what they meant. The banks were the ones that did not know because they were changing the rules and the terms and conditions. That is just not fair.