Michael McGrath (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome Mr. Crowley and his colleagues to the meeting. To pick up from where Senator Rose Conway-Walsh left off, we should acknowledge that we would not be here today having this discussion were it not for the tracker mortgage scandal. That was the catalyst for all of the various initiatives and events since then, not least the Central Bank's report into behaviour and culture at the Irish retail banks. The industry's own initiative with the banking culture board also stemmed from that scandal.

The reality is that tens of thousands of customers were wronged and while the industry and individual banks will argue that certain instances were down to interpretation of the contracts and so on, there were very clear, black and white instances of customers being wronged. I am not asking Mr. Crowley to get into that today but it is fair to say that is the background and it explains why we are here today. That was a very costly experience for many of the people we represent. It will end up being very costly in financial terms for the banks, with estimates now at more than €1 billion. We have dealt with many individual cases where lives have been turned upside down, where people have lost their homes and families have had to go through negative life changing experiences because of it. We look at these reports and they can seem to be very abstract and have little relevance to people but they all stem from the tracker episode. In itself, that was not the first episode in the history of Irish banking, by any means, where consumer interests were not protected. It was a very bruising affair and its effects continue today. We will have the banks in before us again in the next month or so to discuss it and other issues.

The Central Bank's report on behaviour and culture was completed in July 2018. It involved each bank being issued with a risk mitigation programme. I do not expect the witnesses to be aware of what each individual bank has done because the Central Bank issued institution-specific findings from its behaviour and culture reviews. To Mr. Crowley's knowledge, has the work on bringing forward a risk mitigation programme progressed since the publication of the Central Bank's report? What steps have the banks taken to address the institution-level measures that were recommended?