Gerard Craughwell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

In terms of the tracker mortgage issue raised by Senator Davitt, one of the questions we must ask ourselves is why someone is not taken out of a bank in handcuffs. Why is nobody in jail? What the banks did is outright fraud and they knew what they were doing. They set out to take money from citizens of this State, knowing what they were doing was wrong. Having being caught out, they have not been man or woman enough to actually repay what they have taken.

The Central Bank does not have sufficient powers to take these people on. More importantly, I believe we should be urging the acting Garda Commissioner to go in there and see exactly what happened. We need to know how it happened, when it happened, who took the decisions and who sanctioned them. We must get to the bottom of this.

We had a period in this country from the late 1990s until 2007 when bank managers were incentivised to throw out loans like confetti. At the end of the day, did anybody really pay a price for that? Did anybody really hurt as a result of that? The only people who hurt in this country of whom I am aware are ordinary, everyday citizens.

I listened to people on the radio this morning and to witnesses who appeared before the Oireachtas committee last week. One man spoke about having a stroke and his wife having a nervous breakdown. People were talking about having to take on second jobs. This morning I heard a woman on the radio who spoke about paying €1,600 per month when she should only have been paying €800 and that was after they tried to fix it.

I do not believe this is an issue for the Government alone; it is an all-parties-and-none issue. We in this House have a responsibility to those who put us here and the same applies to the Dáil. I do not believe anybody in this House wants to make political capital from this. We all want to come together and we all want to see this matter fixed quickly because it is unfair.

There is one further point I would like to make about our famous banks. I know of a couple who wanted to buy an apartment. They had paid €87,000 over seven years in rent and had a deposit of €30,000 that was given to them by their parents. The bank said "No" to them because they did not have any savings record.They paid €87,000 in rent. They had shown a capacity to repay far more their mortgage. It is time the banks of this country started to behave like citizens and treated the people of this country right.