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.

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

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.

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