Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Anti-Austerity Alliance) | Oireachtas source

This is corporate theft and the bosses who masterminded this crime should be made to do the time. We are talking about bank customers who were denied their right to tracker mortgages or the option to have such mortgages and about cases in which the correct tracker mortgage rate of interest was not applied. The Governor of the Central Bank, Mr. Philip Lane, reckons that as many as 15,000 householders have been cheated out of money. It would cost hundreds of millions of euro to repay those who have been cheated in this way. According to some estimates, it would cost €1 billion or even more, but what has been the human cost? People who lost their homes have suffered anxiety and depression. Have there been suicides as a result? What has been the scale of the toll of human misery?

I remind those who believe this was accidental that it happened across the board in all of the banks. That clearly points towards it being systematic organised robbery of thousands of ordinary people. Decisions would have had to have been made by individuals in positions of influence and power. We are talking about crime. Just because it is white collar crime does not mean that it is any less criminal. If one does the crime, one should do the time. To be quite blunt, more than a few jail cells should be cleared out in Mountjoy Prison for the boys who dreamed this one up. Yesterday a former executive of Anglo Irish Bank, Mr. Willie McAteer, was found guilty of an €8 million fraudulent loan arrangement. He will not spend one extra day in prison as a result of the verdict because the sentence will run concurrently with another he is serving. That is wrong and I do not think it should be the template for what happens in this instance.

I will not have time to make all of the other points I intended to make. The tracker mortgage financial product was an attempt to squeeze the last bit of air out of the last credit bubble. A new credit bubble is being pumped up. Although the banks are owned by the State, they are still pursuing a capitalist model of banking. AIB and Permanent TSB are being lined up for privatisation, but we need a different model of banking in this country. The banks should be run as public utilities. They should offer low interest loans to customers and should fund them from customer deposits. They should offer reasonable and low interest rates that would not depend on the boom and bust cycle of the capitalist financial markets.

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That is the model we should pursue rather than the current model. It is a for-profit banking arrangement that has allowed this scandal and corporate theft to take place.

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