We saved the banks and the reward was that we were able to trick customers into valuable tracker tariffs

Fines of around €180 million have been imposed by the central bank on a number of lenders for violating tracker mortgage rules.

Still, no one has ended up behind bars for devastating families by tricking them out of their inexpensive trackers when the economy took a nosedive.

Yes, there are two investigations into individuals being conducted by the central bank, but one of them is mainly about issues other than trackers.

The central bank has focused on punishing institutions. And the fine of the AIB Group is by far the highest at almost 97 million euros. In addition, the bank had to shell out more than 600 million euros in compensation, legal remedies, legal and administrative costs.

And it should. The criminal record is long and makes for depressing reading.

AIB and its subsidiary have finally admitted that they didn’t give people cheap trackers when they were entitled to them. It failed to warn customers who switched from the tracker to a fixed rate for a period that they would not get them back, and wrongly excluded customers from the central bank’s investigation into the tracker issues.

This is just a selection of the 57 rule violations committed by AIB and 36 committed by EBS.

About 21 homes were lost as a direct result of the actions of the two lenders.

And we don’t know how many suicides and mental health problems left families under tremendous financial pressure to make higher mortgage payments after losing their cheap trackers in an era of austerity.

So far, the debacle has cost lenders €1.5 billion in fines, compensation, legal fees and other costs.

Around 41,000 mortgage accounts are affected across all lenders.

At AIB, 10,015 individual customers were affected, while 2,830 EBS customers were affected.

Tracker mortgages were introduced in this country by the Bank of Scotland in 2001, and the public quickly realized it was a good thing. They also worked well for banks for a time when their cost of funding was in line with European Central Bank interest rates.

But the financial crisis of 2008 caused lenders’ borrowing costs to skyrocket. They then launched a campaign to rid their books of as many trackers as possible.

This newspaper was the first to spread the story in October 2009 that there was a problem with banks wrongly refusing person tracking contracts to which they were entitled.

That Irish Independent gained access to a letter from then-Financial Services Ombudsman Joe Meade to the central bank, urging it to investigate what he saw as an industry-wide attempt to get people to ditch their trackers.

It wasn’t until 2015 before the central bank forced lenders to conduct an industry-wide review of their mortgage books to see how many customers had been wronged.

The banks argued and fought back. Of the 41,000 cases across all lenders, half of those admissions were due to the central bank forcing lenders to submit. We bailed out the banks, and they thanked us by tricking their customers with low-cost trackers, all because they miscalculated the profitability of those mortgages.

It is now time for the central bank to face an independent scrutiny as to why it has taken so long to sort this all out.

Some of those affected by the tracker scandal now have teenagers who weren’t even born when the debacle began. It shouldn’t take that long to get to the bottom of a scandal like this.