An increasingly bitter row over presidential candidate Catherine Connolly’s role working as a barrister for the banks, her subsequent criticism of the lenders’ behaviour, and Fine Gael allegations of hypocrisy have dominated the campaign lately.
A review of her Dáil contributions as Independent TD for Galway West shows one critical speech in 2017 during a debate on the tracker-mortgage scandal.
This centred around banks overcharging tens of thousands of customers after they denied them a tracker rate they were entitled to – 1 per cent above European Central Bank rate – or charged the wrong rate of interest, resulting in the loss of 315 homes and buy-to-let properties.
“The banks did this because they got away with it and they knew the tracker mortgages were good for their customers but not good for the profits of the banks, so they decided they would change that,” Ms Connolly said at the time.
RM Block
“What the banks have done is wrong, in my opinion, criminally wrong and there should be a serious Garda investigation into it.
“These are the banks that we bailed out. We talk about the €64 billion as if it were monopoly money and the blanket bank guarantee on 30 September and so on.
“They have done this in our name, but I say clearly they have not done it in my name. What they have done is criminally wrong.”
[ Could Catherine Connolly have refused to act for banks in repossession cases? ]
Regional newspapers during the recession reveal further criticisms.
In November 2010, launching what would become a failed Dáil election bid, the Connacht Sentinel quoted her on the bank bailouts as saying: “These debts were incurred recklessly by the banks, particularly Anglo Irish, AIB and Bank of Ireland, and it is an obscenity for the Government to amalgamate this private debt with the State’s debt and place the burden on the ordinary worker.”
The City Tribune in April 2010 reported her support for a new lobby group, the Small Business Alliance, taking on the banks.
She warned that hundreds of small businesses would go to the wall if the banks did not reverse their decision not to lend or provide overdraft facilities.
She also said the decision to bail out the banks without placing conditions on them to provide loans or overdrafts “is simply unacceptable”.
The City Tribune in November 2010 reported a “bitter row” over conflicts of interest after Ms Connolly, then a councillor, referenced Cllr Michael Crowe, then mayor of Galway, earning about €5,500 a month from the rental accommodation scheme in which private landlords provided houses for rent to the local authority.
He in turn referenced an alleged conflict of interest for her five years earlier on rezoning land for a new school where her husband worked as a teacher. The mayor claimed she should have declared it.
Ms Connolly said it was “shocking” he would infer she had done something wrong and it was a “real abuse of the position of mayor” and “despicable”.
The City Tribune later reported Ms Connolly criticising the change in government housing policy to move away from local authority-owned property to short and long-term leasing of private property for people on housing waiting lists.
The council had no money to buy additional social homes even though house prices had dropped.
“Even more bizarrely, it is proposed to hand back approximately 20 acres of residential zoned land ... to a central body which has yet to be set up and which remains unnamed and unidentified,” she said.
The decisions “make absolutely no sense” in a city where 3,600 households had been on the housing waiting list for up to 10 years, she said.
