Catherine Ardagh (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Today I wish to raise the tracker mortgage scandal. It is absolutely horrendous and morally reprehensible how the banks have treated those who were entitled to be on a tracker rate. There seems to have been systemic abuse of customers by banks and this seems to have been endemic, across the board and nationwide. Banks seem to have been acting in an orchestrated fashion and collectively they have deprived thousands of customers of their contractual tracker rate and have placed others on the wrong rate. If customers treated banks in this way they would be trodden down with High Court writs and untold grief in the blink of an eye. It is not acceptable that banks can treat customers in this way. Thousands of families have been overcharged, many have lost their homes and immeasurable anguish and distress has been caused to them by the banks.

My party colleague, Deputy Michael McGrath, has been raising this issue for many years now and has stuck with it.It was only when customers who have been affected presented last week to the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach, and many radio shows were contacted that the Government Press Office decided to take this on board. We are only now seeing a response from the Government. The Government has been in power since 2011-----