I rise today to discuss the tracker mortgage scandal which has been one of the most shameful examples of wanton greed and arrogance ever displayed since the foundation of the State. Approximately 13,000 defenceless citizens of Ireland who were mostly in a bad bind already had their positions exacerbated by the very entities for which this State surrendered its sovereignty in order to support and prop up. None of us expect charity from banks but to inflict misery and pain needlessly on the coping classes is not acceptable, either in 1917 or 2017. This was not the work of middle ranking bank managers or clerks but a systemic attempt by senior managers to rob and evict their own customers. I am calling on the Leader and his smiling Taoiseach to come out from the bankers' shadows and lead on this issue. We need some leadership.

Senator Davitt must not be reading the newspapers.

I am reading them all right. I have seen the Taoiseach jumping down off ladders, looking into holes but -----

Please do not allow the debate to disintegrate.

Urgent measures are needed to ease the pain and suffering and to rectify the financial problems caused for all victims. I am calling on all banks to put an auditor and senior management team in place to liaise with and recompense all affected customers forthwith. I am also calling for the resignation of any board members who knew that these underhanded practices were in use. Those board members would not last in Ryanair or any other Irish listed company.

The Taoiseach must do us a favour, get down off the ESB man's ladder and tackle this problem. He must turn his pearly white teeth on the banks and their self-assured board members.

They are very personal and intemperate remarks.

I am telling the truth. This is a serious matter that has been going on and on. It has been going on, under Fine Gael, for the last seven years. I am telling the truth.

I was referring to the Senator's very personal remarks.

I do not think the Senator said anything particularly derogatory. Senator Craughwell is next.

I am very interested to hear about Taoisigh being up ladders. The last time I recall one being up a ladder was when Charles Haughey was shaking hands with a window cleaner in Galway-----

The Senator should look to the gentleman sitting beside him.

-----who happened to be on the dole at the time. Let us leave that aside-----

Senator McDowell is a good man.

In terms of the tracker mortgage issue raised by Senator Davitt, one of the questions we must ask ourselves is why someone is not taken out of a bank in handcuffs. Why is nobody in jail? What the banks did is outright fraud and they knew what they were doing. They set out to take money from citizens of this State, knowing what they were doing was wrong. Having being caught out, they have not been man or woman enough to actually repay what they have taken.

The Central Bank does not have sufficient powers to take these people on. More importantly, I believe we should be urging the acting Garda Commissioner to go in there and see exactly what happened. We need to know how it happened, when it happened, who took the decisions and who sanctioned them. We must get to the bottom of this.

We had a period in this country from the late 1990s until 2007 when bank managers were incentivised to throw out loans like confetti. At the end of the day, did anybody really pay a price for that? Did anybody really hurt as a result of that? The only people who hurt in this country of whom I am aware are ordinary, everyday citizens.

I listened to people on the radio this morning and to witnesses who appeared before the Oireachtas committee last week. One man spoke about having a stroke and his wife having a nervous breakdown. People were talking about having to take on second jobs. This morning I heard a woman on the radio who spoke about paying €1,600 per month when she should only have been paying €800 and that was after they tried to fix it.

I do not believe this is an issue for the Government alone; it is an all-parties-and-none issue. We in this House have a responsibility to those who put us here and the same applies to the Dáil. I do not believe anybody in this House wants to make political capital from this. We all want to come together and we all want to see this matter fixed quickly because it is unfair.

There is one further point I would like to make about our famous banks. I know of a couple who wanted to buy an apartment. They had paid €87,000 over seven years in rent and had a deposit of €30,000 that was given to them by their parents. The bank said "No" to them because they did not have any savings record.

They paid €87,000 in rent. They had shown a capacity to repay far more their mortgage. It is time the banks of this country started to behave like citizens and treated the people of this country right.