Gardaí must probe bank tracker scandal

PICTURE the scene: a member of An Garda Síochána is walking past a shop after hours, sees that a glass door has been smashed and that a light is on inside.

Should he make his presence felt and investigate further to see if a crime is being committed, or should he ignore what’s going on, wait for the shop owner to report the crime and then decide if there is cause to go looking for evidence?

There’s only one answer – he should do his job and investigate. And as with a burgled shop premises, so too with the banks and the tracker mortgage fraud.

When it comes to the wrongdoing perpetrated by the banks upon so many citizens, it is obvious that it is not the job of the Central Bank, nor indeed the task of the tracker victims themselves, to provide proof of criminality. It is utterly unambiguous – it is the job of the gardaí.

More than 20,000 people have had money wrongly taken from them. We all accept this. Even the banks themselves have conceded that this is the case. So the only question now is this: did it happen through error or was it a deliberate policy to remove customers from their tracker arrangements and hope they wouldn’t notice they were being fleeced, and that the banks were pocketing their money?

The reality is that it is now up to the gardaí to establish exactly what happened. They are the people with the power to gather the evidence and to see that justice is done.

This is not the job of the Central Bank. It is the job of An Garda Síochána. They must move on this now, establish an investigation, knock on doors and start questioning individuals. Only then will criminality be unearthed and the truth uncovered.