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

The Bank of Ireland staff tracker group has been raised a couple of times already and I will not labour the point but I encourage the bank not to take a legalistic approach when examining this issue. I have read the documentation and will submit questions about it which, I imagine, will be the same questions Deputy Pearse Doherty will have. When the bank reads the documentation, if it is genuine in its efforts to make the bank customer focused, it will recognise that those customers, some of whom are staff or retired staff, inarguably had a legitimate expectation that they would have rolled onto a tracker mortgage. The fact that these people were never on a tracker is not directly relevant. There are thousands of customers who have been deemed impacted in the whole tracker examination and were never on a tracker but had a contractual entitlement to one. I know that, in accordance with the letter of the mortgage contract, these customers did not have a legal right and that appears to be the case on my reading of it. It is, however, also undoubtedly the case that there was much communication telling those customers that they would have the option of rolling onto a tracker. It is not relevant that the tracker product was withdrawn.

We are talking about 200 customers and I really think the smart thing for the bank to do is to come down on the side of those customers. Those people had a legitimate expectation that they would be in a position to benefit from a tracker and I am not aware of any other major outstanding issues from Bank of Ireland's tracker examination. We have outstanding issues with other institutions. I am sure Bank of Ireland has already done this but I suggest it quantifies the extent of this issue and, if it is as insignificant as we think it is, the bank would be better off dealing with it and concluding the matter in that way.