Just to follow up on this, couldn't you also say there is nothing unusual in the way AIB are approaching it either? They have to act in the best interest of the business, and it is in their best interest to avoid this going to court so they have to adopt a certain strategy to limit that.
Mortgage holders documents guarantee a tracker under 3.2 but I would say 90%, maybe 99% don't have a tracker margin in our docs which is what the valuable detail is. We all might want it to be the 1.5% but it's not written into our docs by and large. AIB could have taken that to court and probably we may have ended up somewhere in the middle, maybe not even as good as the FSPO decision. I make this point re the general unaware section of the cohort, many of which just got on with life since 2008 or whatever (of course there are others with very sad and hard luck stories).
I sometimes feel here that the good in what is happening is lost by dwelling on unusual behaviour or correspondence or delays by AIB. To write down anyone's mortgage by 12%, backdating the interest fix to 2010 is incredible. If a person was to do this, it would take double the amount in taxable earnings, not to mention that being available taxable earnings that you have saved over and above your monthly costs. The interest refund isn't capped at the cheque, you have interest savings over the remainder of the mortgage on the 12%, which is worth upwards of 15% of remaining value of mortgages. You could be eligible for LTV discounts. These are amazing things, and AIB will suffer because of this, be they staff cuts, damaged morale, damaged reputation. Not withstanding what Corporate AIB stand for, there a lot of good people working in AIB that have suffered over the years since the crash.
I know this isn't a popular point but this is largely all due to a mistake by AIB by withdrawing trackers rather than increasing the margin by 2% or whatever, it would have knocked a load of people out of the cohort. I don't think it is an easy decision to take this forward the legal route until everything else is bottomed out, a lot of people will just be happy with what has happened.
(appreciate this might be off topic, I was just interested when you noted you were in the legal profession)