Mr. Mike Aynsley:

The MARS process in which we are involved is the same process in which the other banks are involved. The first product roll-outs will take place in December. As Mr. Dukes said, products such as the split mortgage product will give relief. In response to what was said about the provision numbers going up, I would like to refer to what will happen if we accelerate the process without a process of debt forgiveness. I know much of this will come back to views on debt forgiveness. At the moment, the bank does not have any debt forgiveness capacity. The Senator asked whether we write down loans for customers. We have a policy of not writing down loans for customers. We will take write-offs when we sell a loan to another party. A number of loans have been auctioned through a process. Their value is driven by that public process. It depends on what people are prepared to pay for the asset or loan at that particular time.

We do not write that off when selling a loan facility. We do not go through that process with the residential part of the portfolio. It is very much a measured process of working out a consensual solution with the borrower, where we can, as long as the borrower co-operates. As we bring this series of products on line through the MARS process, we hope to address many of the difficulties people are having. Products like the spilt mortgage product, which will give people the capacity to resize the amount of money they spend on a mortgage and park the other part of the resized mortgage, will help people to manage their cashflows as they go through the recovery. Unfortunately, we do not have any mortgage forgiveness or debt forgiveness products that we can offer.

As we said earlier, we are going to look at the very distressed end of our book. We hope to be able to develop a different series of products around that intensive care unit. We have to go through that process. It is difficult because we have inherited what is probably the worst residential book, with the worst system constraints, in the Irish marketplace. We have had to reconstruct much of what one would normally hope to find when one takes over one of these books. We are going through a long and lengthy process.