An inhuman system has taken over and it’s playing with people’s lives

ODDLY enough, I know a lot of people who work in the bank that sent that appalling letter to Stephanie Meehan. They’re decent people, and I know they’ve gone out of their way to help others. I suspect that individually and as a group, they’re horrified at what happened.

It’s absolutely clear too that Stephanie Meehan herself is a brave woman, who has suffered more than enough. As one of the former residents of Priory Hall, she had already lost everything before her partner and fiancé, Fiachra Daly, took his own life. To be told, when you’re still struggling with grief, when you’re still wondering how to cope with the future, that your bank is going to pursue you over interest on your debt — even though the debt has been cleared by insurance — it must have been, as she put it herself, a real kick in the stomach.

She wasn’t told it by a person, of course. Actually, I’m pretty certain that if the people I know in that bank had realised what was going on it wouldn’t have happened. But a computer had taken over. A computer, programmed to mind the bank’s balance sheet above all else, made the decisions. And the people the computer was supposed to be working for failed to stop it.

This was, of all things, a systems failure. But it was a deep one, and a pervasive one. All financial services now are offered by remote control, run by remote control, and doing damage by remote control. Since the banking collapse, the systems have taken over, and the systems are merciless.

What’s more, they get it wrong more than they get it right. It took Stephanie Meehan’s courage, the Late Late Show, and the ensuing publicity for the bank to realise that their systems had made a terrible mistake on their behalf.

I don’t suppose we ever believed we should routinely put the words financial services and compassion in the same sentence. Even in the days when the banks were entirely too generous with money, it was usually the case that the more you had, the more generous they were. The people who took out mortgages to pay for their apartments in Priory Hall had to go through far more hoops than the man who built it.

But when computers take over all the decisions, humanity simply goes out the window in its entirety. There will be those, of course, who will argue that the financial services sector has no choice now but to recover its financial strength at any cost. But the Oireachtas Committee that interviewed all the top bankers last week showed us that the pendulum has swung too far — from the reckless abandon of the recent past to the miserable stringency of pretending that threatening legal letters are some kind of reasonable solution.

The only real justification that the banks offered was to seek to brand everyone in trouble as a “strategic defaulter”. Never put in so many words, of course, but the lingering impression was created and left there. If you can’t cope with debt, you’re a cheat. If you can’t look the bank manager in the eye, because of shame and fear, you’re trying to evade your responsibilities. It has become the default position of the system. The problem is not a problem of reckless lending, it’s a problem of strategic defaulters.

There’s a woman I know. Bright, intelligent, attractive, determined always to do her best. She was struck down in mid-career by a debilitating disease, not life-threatening, but certainly life-damaging. She couldn’t work, and every physical or mental effort required days of recovery.

The only positive thing about the awful condition she acquired was that she was covered in her job by permanent health insurance. Once she satisfied all the tests – the physical, neurological and psychological assessments the insurance company insisted on, the insurance policy kicked in, and gave her an income. It was subject to annual review, and further checks, but there was no doubt whatever that she qualified under all the terms of the policy.

Except, of course, that someone, somewhere, decided she must be cheating. It’s the default position. So they hired a firm of private detectives, and put her under secret surveillance for six days. Then, on foot of what they discovered, they cancelled the policy. She was horrified, of course, at the thought that she had been covertly watched and recorded. And the instinct the service provider was counting on kicked in. What had she done wrong? How had she been cheating? Because that’s the other default position. If they think you’re a cheat, sooner or later they make you feel guilty too.

Luckily, she knew deep down she had nothing to hide. So, using the Data Protection Act, she demanded everything they had on her. And got it eventually, a huge envelope of reports and documents, including two DVDs of the footage they had taken with their secret cameras and a 30-page written report of what the private investigators had found.

I’ve read the reports. They describe, in stunningly boring detail, an ordinary life. In fact a limited life. Taking kids to school. Shopping. Retrieving a handbag from a car. Walking, sometimes with a dog. Chatting to neighbours. They found no evidence of a job or career or any kind of earning capacity, because it doesn’t exist. No evidence of drinking or carousing or high living, because it isn’t possible. And of course, because it happened out of reach of their cameras, no reports of the migraines, the sore throats, the endless hours of essential rest that offer no relief.

The system commissioned the reports — and because it did, it used that tawdry and shameful device to cut her off from essential support to which she was absolutely entitled. The policy has now been restored, I like to think because some human being, when challenged, actually read the reports supplied by the private detectives and realised that it exposed absolutely no wrong-doing whatever. But it is still subject to annual review.

I suspect there are dozens, if not thousands, of examples of that kind. For as long as I’ve known human nature, I’ve believed that the great majority of people want to hold their heads up when it comes to debt. Most parents I know want nothing more in their lives than to leave something behind for their children.

Of course there are some chancers. But the biggest chancers are the ones whose policies and ideology caused the mess, and the ones who made and squandered millions or billions using other people’s money. Many of the real chancers have been able to walk away from their debts, and more than a few are living on decent pensions. People who struggle from day to day, or who can’t cope with mortgages they entered into in good faith, have to try to do their best. By and large, they want to. They don’t deserve to be labelled as chancers, and treated as if they were the core problem, by the system that destroyed Ireland in the first place.

The real strategic default is irresponsible politics and inhuman systems. That’s what needs to be rooted out.