Kieran O'Donnell (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State, Deputy D'Arcy. I commend the great work he does in the area of banking. I want to deal with where we are now and what we can do. The banks are being dragged, kicking and screaming, into addressing the tracker mortgage issue. Something that brought that to the fore was four witnesses coming before the Joint Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach, who were compelling. The Minister met with the banks and the banks largely committed to have compensation and redress under way before the end of the year. Does the Minister of State have any update on where it stands at this moment? When does he expect to meet the banks before the end of the year to find out precisely where we stand?

At the European Parliament Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs yesterday, Mr. Brian Hayes, MEP, asked Commissioner Vestager about cartels with regard to interest rates in Ireland. It is high-time that the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission looked into that issue. There is a view among the public that a cartel operates between the main banks. That has to be investigated. The competition authority or, as it is now called, the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, is the authority to do it. It has stated previously that the mortgage market in Ireland is dysfunctional. It owes it to people, considering the rates they are paying, to look at the matter. The Government has indicated that legislation for white-collar crime is coming in and that needs to be expedited.

I heard both the Minister of State, Deputy D'Arcy, and the Minister, Deputy Donohoe, mention the possibility of class action legislation. We need to look at that. We cannot allow the banks to behave in the way that they have with tracker mortgages. I meet people on a regular basis in the Limerick constituency. A lady contacted me in the past two weeks after she was visited by an individual on behalf of a bank, who had a letter, at 6 o'clock on a Friday evening when she was on her own in the house. She was petrified. That is not on. This person arrived to drop in something for her former partner and she rang me in a panic. I had to put her in touch with a personal insolvency practitioner, PIP, who could make contact with the bank to bring some sort of reason to the matter.

It now looks, from investigations, as if people who were on tracker mortgages agreed to go to a fixed rate on the basis that they would return to a tracker rate. There now also appears to be a category where people were on trackers and were put on variable rates without even being told by the banks. This was done by all the banks. It has to be asked why this was done. The banks cannot be above the law. In some cases, it could make a difference on an average mortgage of approximately €200,000 of approximately €4,000 a year in mortgage repayments with regard to how banks fiddled with interest rates. We need to have closure and people are entitled to payments of compensation and redress.

The intervention by the Minister should not have been necessary but I felt it was appropriate at the time, and I think a further intervention will be needed. When does the Minister of State expect that will happen? Every person with a tracker mortgage is an individual with a family who is under pressure from the banks. Is it not quite ironic that these same people, the taxpayers, bailed out the banks in the years after 2008 while, at the same time, these banks were ripping them off with high interest rates? It is a bit like going into a show or nightclub where one has to pay going in the front door and again when leaving. It is incredible that the banks think they can get away with it. Their approach and mentality is like that for whatever reason. In 2008, in either the committee that dealt with finance or economic and monetary affairs, I asked for the banks to come in because there was no lending to small and medium-sized enterprises. That was in July 2008 and all the banks said things were fine. The only one to cry that day was Richie Boucher, who said the banks had a problem. The banks then came and took taxpayers' money and are now ripping them off again. We need to bring closure to this and ensure that it never happens again.