Mr. Michael Bennett:

The proposal made by the Deputy is that the portion of the loan above 80% would be unsecured lending and would be non-recourse and he asks whether there would be an appetite among insurers to insure such a loan. The first step would be to fundamentally change the way mortgages and credit are distributed in Ireland and to tier mortgages into two components, a secured and an unsecured component. That would need to be evaluated in detail to determine its impact. The second aspect to this is the appetite of insurers to lend in those circumstances. We would term that a "second lien" although it is not even that; it is an unsecured second lien which sits over the first security that the bank has towards the borrower. It is not the type of risk which we would have an appetite for insuring at the moment