I couldn’t give a damn about f ine of €100m
IMAY be one of 41,000 borrowers affected by the banking tracker controversy but the reality is that now, 13 years after I received a bank letter telling me I was being overcharged on my Celtic Tiger mortgage, I couldn’t give a damn. So much life has happened since then. My kids grew up, problems with childcare faded into the background to be replaced by the trials of middle age and, inevitably, the mortgage became more manageable.
The massive €100.5m fine for Bank of Ireland feels about as relevant to me as free contraceptives for women under 25.
In therapy-speak, I have ‘moved on’. I have got ‘closure’ on an episode that caused me considerable confusion and stress quite a long time ago.
It forced me to suffer the condescension of stonewalling bank officials who behaved as if I was a simpleton or a chancer, hopping on a bandwagon that I couldn’t understand.
It ate up my precious time on a complaint to the Financial Ombudsman which, against the dire warnings of said bank officials, resulted in a positive outcome for yours truly and a financial settlement mediated by the ombudsman.
At any time during that protracted process, had the fraud squad laid siege to the Bank of Ireland, an executive been sacked or a hefty fine been imposed by the Central Bank, I would have been reassured about our financial system and about justice being done for the little people, especially the 98 parties who heartbreakingly lost their family homes due to the scandal.
INSTEAD, when I was doing battle with patronising officials, the bank was still hounding householders for corruptly elevated repayments, initiating possession orders against borrowers, denying them the tracker rate they were entitled to and hoping against hope that they would get away with their shabby little scam.
Between that remorseless amoral greed and the passage of time, I find it impossible to get exercised about the so-called ‘milestone day’ of a record banking fine.
To my mind, it’s just another example of ‘justice delayed is justice denied’. This admittedly jaded legal maxim could have been invented to address the default setting of Irish life, which is to drag out investigations into eternity so that the scandal falls from living memory, no one with power
or authority is held accountable and the culture that spawned the illegal practices or corporate irregularity continues to flourish.
The recent report into allegations of corporate wrongdoing during the sale of the Siteserv company took seven years and €10m to complete.
Seven years to decide there was nothing shady about the Irish Bank Resolution Corporation’s (IBRC) role in the deal? It took the FBI less than 18 months to get enough material on Donald Trump to warrant a raid on his private office.
What is wrong with us? The only silver lining of the Siteserv footdragging is its prompting the closure of the IBRC Commission which was due to investigate 37 transactions during the crash. Bad news for fat-cat lawyers but some respite for taxpayers.
Commissions of investigation were meant to be faster than tribunals but it hasn’t panned out that way. True, they are cheaper but that’s not saying much given how the six tribunals established between 1997 and 2006 cost more than €340m, with the planning tribunal, the longest running at 15
years the most expensive although arguably the most effective, after which Taoiseach Bertie Ahern’s resigned over the infamous digout controversy.
BUT even on the rare occasion that investigations are swift, like the just published report into the 999-call fiasco, no one falls on their sword. The scandal of cancelled emergency calls which meant that allegations of serious sexual assaults and abuse were not investigated, and vulnerable people remained at risk has been blamed on everything from poor training and supervisory checks to ageing technology and whatever-you’re-having yourself. If you spread the blame wide enough, no one can be held culpable.
Instead ‘lessons are learned’ so that ‘trust’ will be restored. We’ve heard it all before.
Perhaps the Government could hold an investigation into how long this mantra has been dished out by the powerful elite to placate us. It shouldn’t take more than a decade. Around €20m would cover it.