Solution on mortgages will not end controversy

The Government faces a political headache over the sky-high rates that banks are charging their standard variable mortgage customers, but its solution is unlikely to mark the end of the controversy.

The harsh facts are that the banks were rescued at huge costs by Irish taxpayers. And the best brains in the troika failed to crack the code of the Irish mortgage books.

How do you make lenders profitable when €60bn worth of their tracker mortgage loans, or just over half of all €115bn in home loans, make little or no money?