Leo Varadkar in Cork: Good news and bad

LEO VARADKAR, making his first visit to Cork as Taoiseach, brought good news from Dublin yesterday, when at a Chamber of Commerce and Irish Examiner business breakfast he announced that planning work on the long-awaited Cork-Limerick motorway was at last to be started.

It’s been estimated the 96-kilometre road could help to generate more than 5,000 jobs in the region, prevent some 120 crashes every year, and, as Mr Varadkar pointed out, change the perception that all roads lead to Dublin.

But let’s temper our delight just a little. The Taoiseach revealed that money had been found to start work now on route options, design and planning work, adding that budgeting for land purchase and construction costs — the really big money — would be done for the next 10-year capital plan, in which the M20 would have the “utmost priority”.

That upcoming capital plan kicks off in 2021, which will enable Mr Varadkar to return to Cork during the next general election with yet — we hope — more good news. That’s party politics, and that’s how roads get built.

Of more immediate concern is the tracker mortgage scandal and the plight of families who have suffered through no fault of their own. How does a bank begin to compensate people who have endured strokes and nervous breakdowns in 2015 after being wrongly taken off tracker mortgages? It’s a tough question, but the country now expects the banks — which are happy to boast about the very bright people they have in senior management — must come up with an answer. In Cork yesterday, theTaoiseach — who said he had benefited from a tracker deal in his younger days — offered a reasonable suggestion: the culpable banks should apologise, repay the money owed, and make compensation payments to their customers . . . and do it immediately. He confessed that he was unsure if the government had the legal powers needed to compel the banks — even those in partial state ownership — to repay money by a given date. In that case, the Government must legislate to get them. The Taoiseach’s words are welcome; what’s needed now is action to ensure that the victims of this scandal — more than 30,000 of them, according to the mortgage adviser who uncovered the swindle — get justice.

Others who feel aggrieved are the 23,000 women who have lost out on pension payment rates to the tune of approximately €1,500 a year because they left employment before 1994 to care for children. The anomalous consequence of pension rules changes in 2012, the situation, says the finance minister, is “bonkers” but regrets he can do nothing now to undo the mess. The Taoiseach’s message on this — another money scandal — in Cork yesterday offered no comfort at all to those who are out of pocket, again through no fault of their own. They will get no cheer from the news that the National Asset Management Agency — the “bad bank” created to take toxic loans from five banks — will clear its €30bn debt three years ahead of schedule.

The banks, it seems, can just get away with it.