Mr. Padraic Kissane:

The first advantage is to gain control. With a tracker mortgage, the control over what the bank could charge lay with the customer and this was maximised at the margin that was set. This is why the margin issue in regard to Permanent TSB is so pertinent. The one key issue with each tracker mortgage was the margin a customer was to be charged and there was no such thing as a non-price promise tracker; it never existed. When the customer had an ECB+1% rate, for example, he or she had control but when the crash happened, the banks needed to get control back. The people affected, 33,600 of them and growing, are now no longer in charge of what the bank can charge them. We could not control what the ECB did but we could control what the bank charged. When the ECB rate started to drop the banks were not obliged to pass this on to the people who had lost trackers and, while they reduced rates for a while, they then put them up.