Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 23 January 2018

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach

Tracker Mortgages: Allied Irish Banks

4:00 pm

Photo of Pearse DohertyPearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

We are dealing with AIB here but all of the banks are the bloody same. All of them did the same. None of these 9,000 customers ended up better off with more money in their pockets. They were not granted additional houses. AIB took the houses off them. This committee will hear from the Bank of Ireland that it did the exact same thing. We are supposed to believe that this issue arose due to unintended consequences. We are supposed to believe that some of the highest paid individuals in the history of the State sat around board tables and decided to discontinue a product in 2008 without realising that 9,000 of their customers had a contractual obligation. I cannot swallow that guff and I do not think the bank should ask the public to swallow it. It was in the interest of the bank to move people off trackers. What I have heard here is that anybody who could have been moved off was moved off. The only problem that the officials had as bankers, and I am not talking personally but AIB corporate, is that they could not get rid of the other hundreds of thousands of people who had trackers at that point in time because they clearly had it written into their contracts.

As a result, AIB could not figure out a way to swindle them out of their own money. That is what I believe happened and I think it will continue to happen.

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