Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

I am sharing time with Deputy Boyd Barrett.

I want to start by quoting from an email I received from a woman named Caitríona. It states:

We fixed our mortgage in August 2007 for three years, and it clearly stated on our fixing contract from Ulster Bank that we had the option of returning to our tracker rate upon the expiry of the fixed period. As happened many others, of course, this was then denied to us in 2010 and Ulster Bank from that point on have overcharged us to the tune of hundreds of euro a month. For example, in 2016 they were charging us 4.1% when our rate ought to have been 0.75% ... Finally, in February this year ... they put us back on the right rate. However, they still are holding on to tens of thousands of euros of our money and our lives are on hold until we know how much of our money they are going to return to us, and when. During the years in question, our two children were born and they are now aged 8 and 6. They have never known a time when we have not been battling with the bank and stressing to the hilt about trying to get our situation resolved. In order to make ends meet during these years: we have taken long term students in to live with us to help pay the bills; we have stopped paying into our pensions ... we poured every single penny of our life savings into the punitively high mortgage in order to bring down our outgoings.

8 o’clock

They have never missed a payment.

There are worse situations than that, such as those involving people who have lost their homes. There has been a devastating impact on tens of thousands of people. The Government, the Central Bank and the banks say it is disgraceful, outrageous and a scandal. It is all of those things but it is more than that. It is not just a scandal, it is a scam perpetrated by those at the top of the banks upon their own customers in a very conscious way. Bertolt Brecht said that bank robbery is an initiative of amateurs and that true professionals establish a bank. That is what happened here. It has happened repeatedly in this country over the past several decades. Scams, robberies and cons have been perpetrated by banksters on ordinary people.

We are told that the banks are going to apologise and come back and it will all be sorted by Christmas. However, one has to consider what went on. It was not an accident. It was not by accident that the banks all decided at the same time that people would not get the tracker rates to which they were entitled. It was a calculated decision by those at the tops of the banks in order to lower the size of their tracker loan books. It is a decision that must have been taken by senior management and appears to have been taken in a co-ordinated, calculated way that indicates the existence of a cartel or conspiracy between the banks. It points to the need for a criminal investigation into both those aspects. When asked about the seeming cartel nature of what happened, the Central Bank last week said it was a question of culture, that all the banks have the same horrific culture, which they probably do, and therefore all happened upon the scheme at the exact same time. That stretches belief and unless such culture operates by telepathy whereby they all decided to implement this scam at the same time, it raises very serious questions. A criminal investigation into the defrauding, scamming and conning of bank customers is needed.

We are told it will all be sorted by Christmas but I am sceptical of the good faith of the banks. Members of the Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach were told by the banks over a year ago that it would all be sorted by Christmas 2016. If the banks can avoid having it sorted, they will.

The Minister is now threatening to use our ownership of AIB and Permanent TSB, for example, if the banks do not resolve the problem. However, the State owns the banks. The process of reprivatisation should never have been started and should be reversed but the State should use our current ownership of AIB and PTSB, such as it is. The Government must take responsibility. It should clear out the boards of the banks and run them in a very different way, as public utilities for the benefit of society, consumers and ordinary people rather than being run on commercial grounds which lead to this type of scam being perpetrated on their customers and society at large.

See this speech in context