Taoiseach’s Halloween joke in bad taste amid real horror

THE Government just about dragged itself through a tricky week grappling with the banks’ flagrant abuse of their customers.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe outbid everyone else in the indignation stakes, condemning the banks who wrongly deprived tens of thousands of customers of tracker mortgages. But as the dust settled yesterday, it was clear that they are still reliant on the banks living up to their declaration to “do the right thing”.

We are still unclear about how, if ever, we will find out how this happened. As Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin told the Dáil, it is also remarkable that all the banks took the same action in or about the same time.

The two Government principals spoke in only very general terms about the need for cultural change in the banks. We know nothing about how it is to be done – except that the banks will not change of their own volition.

Yet the Taoiseach this weekend signed off his video message with a rather flippant joke.

“Next week as you know is Halloween so I’m very keen to find out what costume Paschal Donohoe is going to wear this year. He won’t tell me but I’m sure we’ll find out next week,” Mr Varadkar quipped.

Lest we be accused of being po-faced, and lacking a holiday weekend sense of humour, let’s recall the sheer scale of this problem. In a series of coordinated updates on the scandals, the banks revealed that 14,982 affected customers had been identified in reviews of trackers since 2015. But up to now fewer than 3,500 have been compensated.

But 7,100 borrowers were found to have been affected in an earlier examination taking the total number of confirmed cases to 22,082. There are potentially up to another 7,000 disputed cases yet to be agreed on. It is no exaggeration that this amounts to up to 30,000 families who have suffered not just loss of considerable sums of money, but a huge toll of attrition on mental and physical health, and considerable fallout for family relations.

For these thousands of people, the tracker mortgage scandal has been a real nightmare as the banks continued their cavalier acts and compounded their bad behaviour rather like the mortgage compound interest which heaped interest upon interest. But Messrs Donohoe and Varadkar will trust to the banks’ newfound good behaviour and deal with a huge case-load this side of the new year.

It will be another nine months before many thousands of families are compensated. It will be the same time frame before any sanctions against the banks are even considered.

Mr Donohoe will receive two Central Bank reports, one in December on the banks’ progress and another one in March on “banking culture”. It is only then will he consider taking any real Government action.

The options for the Government still include raising the bank levy; vetoing the reappointment of board directors with State banks, or the amounts they get paid; or ordering stricter reporting rules.

For the rest, Mr Donohoe said wronged customers’ compensation will be set by the Central Bank. He was happy with the powers the regulator had.

All of that had the ring of another bad joke. The banks, for whom the word ethics is unknown, are unlikely to be quaking in their boots.

For thousands of people the tracker mortgage scandal has been a real nightmare as the banks continued their cavalier acts