Every Irish scandal is ultimately a variation on the same grubby, grisly theme.
A big institution will be revealed to have treated ordinary members of the public as though they were marks to be milked and/or bugs to be squished. A government watchdog eventually steps in – but far too late and with little discernible empathy for the lives already ruined, the futures derailed. Facile apologies will follow. But, in the end, will anything have changed?
That familiar piece of very Irish theatre is played out in the riveting new documentary Trackers: The People v The Banks (RTÉ One, 9.35pm), which explores the human misery inflicted by Ireland’s financial institutions in the years following the crash.
Acting with the same impunity they had displayed during the reckless Celtic Tiger years, the banks decided that, having taken the public finances for a ride by seeking bailouts worth billions of euro, it was then time to bilk us all over again.
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They did so by denying tracker mortgages to people who were entitled to revert to European Central Bank (ECB)-set interest rates after having fixed their rates for a pre-agreed term (when the ECB rates temporarily spiked).
The original deal was they would be allowed to go back to the preferential tracker level – but the banks just thought again and decided they wouldn’t make as much money that way. They had no legal justification for refusing to offer tracker rates in line with those set by the ECB. But they did it anyway.
Was any of this a surprise? To outsiders, perhaps. Having almost dragged the economy over a cliff with their bottomless pit of bad loans, there might have been an expectation that the banks would learn some humility.
But as everyone in Ireland knows, that was never on the cards – a message brought horribly home to mortgage payers trying to return to their lower tracker rates (as was their legal entitlement).
They included Thomas and Claire Ryan, whose finances were crippled when their bank, Permanent TSB, refused to put them back on a tracker rate. Such was the pressure that Thomas suffered a stroke in his sleep and Claire temporarily lost the ability to speak.
A similar trauma was experienced by Catriona and John Redmond, whose weekly budget was picked apart by Ulster Bank after they ran into financial difficulties following the bank’s refusal to put them back on a tracker. They were required to justify their expenses line by line – even money spent feeding their family.
This absorbing documentary is full of faceless villains. It does, however, uncover a hero in financial adviser Padraic Kissane, who took on the banks.
“The thing to understand about the tracker mortgage scandal is people at the time were already under severe financial strain because of the economic collapse. When the tracker scandal occurred it really was a straw that broke the camel’s back,” he says.
“When I first started looking into the whole area I had no idea it was going to take over my life. A lot of people would probably say I became obsessive about it because the more I looked the deeper my concerns became.”
The banks’ regulator, the Central Bank of Ireland, finally agreed to an investigation – but only after displaying the kind of inertia that characterised its response to kamikaze-style overlending by the banks in the run up to the collapse. If the country’s financial institutions learned little from the crash then neither did the official watchdog, it is tempting to conclude.
“Some ideas could have been implemented earlier,” says Patrick Honohan, governor of the Central Bank from 2009 to 2015. “It’s always nice to do things sooner if they’re going to be effective sooner. I don’t dispute that.”
It’s a grim and infuriating story – but credit to RTÉ for bringing some humour to the table. The documentary is introduced by actor Aidan Jordan, who memorably stood up on a double-decker bus and said “I don’t know what a tracker mortgage is” in a 2007 ad for the Irish Financial Services Regulatory Authority – a toothless, quango-esque offshoot of the Central Bank quietly reintegrated to the mothership as the economy went up in flames.
“Now I do know what a tracker mortgage is,” he says. So do the rest of us. The unanswered question is whether the banks feel any genuine remorse for what they did to mortgage holders. I wouldn’t bet my house on it.
