Mr. Cormac Butler:

I will start with the Covid-19 loans. As the Deputy is aware, Covid-19 loans are made available to people who get into difficulty as a result of the financial crisis. That allows them to delay payments until the Covid crisis abates and they are in a position to earn money again. I have a letter on file from an individual who was classified as a consumer and who could therefore avail of consumer legislation, in other words, legislation on unfair terms. When the loan was restructured, the same individual was classified as a non-consumer. The individual was a consumer in the letter with the first offer. For the Covid loan, it was stated the individual is now a non-consumer and therefore cannot avail of the consumer legislation. There are two impacts. The first is that if I borrow money from the bank and it sneaks in an unfair term, as Mr. Lawlor alluded to, I can go before the courts and they are obliged to examine the matter. I do not even have to bring it up in the courts or raise it; they are obliged to examine contracts for unfair terms. If the individual is not classified as a consumer, that protection appears to disappear.

Second, on the tracker mortgage, in order for a bank to carry out the tracker mortgage, it must consider interest rates from about 2005 to the present. If there is proof that between 2005 and, say, 2012, the interest rate charged tracked Euribor or ECB rates, there is an obligation to go into a tracker examination. The customer I have mentioned was told he was a non-consumer and that the institution was therefore not obliged to keep records for the full period, but only for the period from, say, 2012 onwards. By that stage, the banks had been increasing rates regardless of Euribor. Therefore, by changing the customer's classification from consumer to non-consumer, the institution was able to put itself in a much stronger bargaining position. The customer in question is being forced, as we speak, to sell property at distressed prices. The bank has written to the auctioneer to state that under no circumstances is it to put the loan back onto the market, that it, that is, the bank, has classified the loan such that it is to be sold immediately and that it will take legal action if the auctioneer tries to do otherwise.