Fianna Fail is calling on banks to put thousands of mortgage customers on the correct tracker rate immediately.

Spokesperson Michael McGrath TD made the call after it was revealed that Central Bank has still not provided the banks with a firm deadline to restore the affected customers.

Deputy McGrath said: "While the Central Bank's industry-wide Tracker probe has been up and running since 2015, many customers who are legally entitled to be a tracker rate of interest continue to be charged multiples of that rate by their bank. Other customers have been reinstated to an artificial tracker rate of between 3% and 4%.

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"A family with a mortgage of €200,000 which is wrongly paying a variable rate of around 4% and should be paying a tracker rate of 1%, is paying about €500 every single month in interest more than it should be paying. Many of these customers have been paying this every single month, every year, for many years. This is the human reality behind this issue. This is an enormous issue in the budgets of many thousands of households across Ireland today.

"The Central Bank says that banks are required to reinstate customers on to the correct rate as soon as they have been identified. However, my experience from dealing with affected mortgage holders tells an entirely different story.

"This pace of progress and lack of urgency is simply not acceptable. The number one priority for the Central Bank has to be to ensure that customers who are being wrongly denied a tracker rate or who are being charged the wrong tracker rate are put on the correct rate without any further delay."

(CD/LM)