This is a very good summary of the Central Bank's approach and so is worth highlighting.
The Central Bank is not, and should not, be the final arbiter of whether a bank should give someone a tracker.
So the bank managed to push the banks on the more obvious cases.
I am guessing that there were other cases where the Central Bank wanted the banks to redress people and the banks refused.
And, of course, there are cases where the Central Bank fully agreed with the lender that the borrowers had no case.
And then you have the very odd one of the AIB Prevailing Rate cohort.
Many people believed that these had no case at all. AIB strongly asserted that they had done nothing wrong and even if they had, well the borrowers didn't lose out as the prevailing rate would have been higher than the SVR. I don't know where the Central Bank stands on this, but, at the Oireachtas Finance Committee, Governor Lane seemed to agree with some aspects of AIB's argument. I don't think he should have done this without listening to the customers' arguments first. But the key point is that the Central Bank persuaded AIB that they were wrong in not giving the option to the borrowers, and now all 6,000 impacted customers have the right to appeal to the Ombudsman and the High Court. Without the Central Bank's involvement, AIB would have done nothing and it would have been up to the borrowers to try to convince the Ombudsman and the Central Bank that they were not time-barred. And, of course, the 6,000 customers would not have been notified that there was an issue.
And that is how it should be - that the Ombudsman and High Court, and not the Central Bank, should decide these cases.
Brendan