Professor Patrick Honohan:

As for the question of letters, it was inevitable in the first stage that the banks would seek the easiest cases. In other words, the easiest for them were those which they could justify on the basis of a long period of no payment, no engagement and so on. Consequently, they can easily satisfy the first quarter's requirement by such pursuit but this cannot and will not be the end of the story. However, we must make sure that the banks maintain and improve their capacity to then process the cases and not deal with them in the unsatisfactory way described by Deputy Boyd Barrett. On legislation, I am aware there have been Private Members' initiatives on legislation in the banking area that potentially are very useful. I will just make the point that in the last number of years, we have more or less exceeded our allocation in the legislative programme with all the financial legislation that has been required and so we probably would get short shrift on that. However, the time may perhaps come for that in due course.

On the question of loan-to-value and debt-to-income ratios and controlling bank behaviour in that way, I am very much in favour of that and it could have been done in the run-up to the crisis. It is not perhaps the most urgent pressing need now, in the sense that the issue now is in getting banks to make any loans, even with a very low loan-to-value ratio. They are not making extravagant loans like they used. However, it is in our toolkit and we can activate those sorts of limitations in due course. I am unsure whether putting a floor on loan to value would be the way to get more lending and do not think that is a practical way to proceed. As for the education of bankers, there are a lot of initiatives, albeit not on the part of the Central Bank, whereby the Institute of Bankers in Ireland, in co-operation with UCD and so on, is expanding the programme there. While it is not something about which I know much, it obviously would have been very valuable had it been available previously. The question of tenant rights and the buy-to-lets appears to be outside our purview. While I acknowledge there are issues there, I do not think it can be used as a reason to halt and leave people who simply cannot afford them with buy-to-let properties. One cannot state that because there might be a tenant issue, one cannot possibly proceed to clean up that situation, leave the borrower in a situation he or she can afford and move the process along. It is not really for me to propose anything on the tenant situation, as that would be in a different sphere.