Mr. Padraic Kissane:

On the loss of home, I have people who moved 30 miles to try and make ends meet. They sold the home that they had to move to a cheaper home and brought the negative equity with them. I refer to the number of people who traded negative equity homes at the time in order to try and make ends meet. The tragedy of all this is that all of these customers, up to the investigation beginning, have believed this is their own fault and of their own making, that they were the fools who went and bought the nicer home or retained a first home to have it as a pension supplement later on in life. Up to the point where they find out that there was a tracker issue in the first place, they were to blame for everything. One can imagine, if one introduces financial stress into a family home, it brings with it a myriad of related issues - the blame game, the effects on relationships, the effects on children. A 12 year old wrote a letter to me on behalf of his mother and father. It is an astonishing letter. A 12 year old got the whole issue of the appalling behaviour of what has gone on.

If I am wrong, then fine. I know I am not wrong. I have checked it. I have read it. I have spent 12 to 16 hours a day, six days a week running it, looking at it and assessing it. I covered my floor in the office one day with all of the AIB conditions and promotional material. There is one piece that they wrote, in 2015, that many more customers are choosing tracker given the certainty if offers them with the margin above the ECB rate along with the flexibility to switch to fixed at any point, and then they changed it.

This is the issue I raise. The consumer protection codes are there. If there are 20,000 people who fixed, lost or whatever without being told by the bank the consequences of their actions, the 2006 consumer protection code states that one cannot diminish, disguise or obscure important information. There is only one piece of information that is important with a tracker mortgage, that is, the margin above the ECB rate. Everything else is variable vis-à-visthe ECB.

It brings me to the issue of the prevailing rate. It is a disgrace for a bank to attempt to take one word from 14 pages of documentation and that is the reason the customers are not entitled to revert to tracker. Now the onus of responsibility lies on the customers. They will be blame the customers, stating that the customers did not read their documentation and that it says, on page 4, "the prevailing". The only reason there is a prevailing element to a tracker mortgage - I will challenge them all the way on this - is for the variable element of ECB. The margin is set.