Mr. Patrick Sharkey:

As an example, the decision of AIB Group to establish a four-person team to address AIB and EBS customers was a positive step. One of the issues of concern that came out of our meeting with the Banking and Payments Federation of Ireland was that we were bringing up the whole issue of unambiguously restoring the value of our homes in terms of completely removing the damage clause. A comment from one of the banks was that it is quite relaxed in regard to the value of the asset. That is all well and good for a single mortgage and a single home on a bank balance sheet but this is our life's work, these are the homes that we have worked hard for and where we are trying to bring up our families. For us, there is nothing more important than restoring our home to full value and to know that, post-remediation, if we want to remortgage our home to get an improved interest rate, we can do so.

We need this to be joined up and we need to have joined-up thinking. In my introduction, I referenced that through no fault of my own, my mortgage is with a vulture fund, so I will need to refinance and will need to get my situation restored. I need somebody somewhere to tell me that they regard this work as fully restoring my house as a mortgageable property. A mortgage is not simply to pay for a house and a person takes out one mortgage. Ultimately, in a functioning market, if another mortgage provider has a better interest rate, people should be able to remortgage and get a cheaper rate. That is denied to us. There could also be issues in regard to loan-to-value mortgages in terms of reduced or more beneficial interest rates that we may not get because our homes do not have that full value restored.

To answer the question, I think the penny is dropping but the need to fully address what it is in our terms and conditions is not as simple as a demolition sign-off. It is about restoring our homes to full mortgageable condition. That is where the independence of the engineer’s certification and placing the science at the centre of all of this have to be at the centre of each and every remediation.