Mr. Brendan O'Connor:

The Central Bank reports completed split mortgages, so there will always be a lag. They take between six and 12 months to complete, as valuations must be carried out, legal documentation must be drawn up and so forth. There will always be a lag between offers and completions. When we offered mortgages in the first quarter, which was prior to the implementation of MARP, we sent out 1,428 offers. We sent them to people on the basis of their payment history. We did not have standard financial statements, SFSs, so we went through their payment history. We looked at what they were paying on a monthly basis and, based on the premise that they were paying what they could afford to pay, they would qualify for a split mortgage. We sent out 1,428 of those letters. Approximately 50% responded, 50% did not respond and we were not able to make contact with them by telephone. When those came back we examined the SFSs. We took the net income and adjusted it for reasonable living expenses which, in our case at that time, were significantly higher than the 20% above the Insolvency Service of Ireland. When we adjusted them for reasonable living expenses, the vast majority could be solved without a split mortgage. Term extensions would have included quite a few, as would capitalisations. In the case of the vast majority, even though the payment history would suggest that they were eligible for a split mortgage, the SFS supplied by the customer would have shown that the solution was something other than the split mortgage.