Mr. Simon Crone:

To answer the Deputy's first point, we believe it is unfair that only people who have wealthy parents or some way of coming up with a 20% deposit would be able to access home ownership. We believe that mortgage insurance would facilitate a more open market and assist people who have good jobs and strong affordability but who may not be able to save up the large deposit required. We believe it would create a fairer market for all first-time buyers. I agree with the Deputy that it absolutely should be a lender-paid product.

Mortgage indemnity insurance is not the same as mortgage payment protection insurance. The latter clearly had a distribution issue. As underwriters, we could not comment on the distribution practices of the banks around that and this committee has dealt with that issue previously.

On the final point, we believe it would be appropriate for the insurers to waive their subrogation rights against borrowers. As with any secured lending environment, the lender would always need to have some form of recourse or recovery rights on the borrowers but we would be willing to waive our subrogation rights.

If we paid a €10,000 claim, potentially the lender would forgive some of the claim we made, if the borrower was in negative equity. The bank would still clearly carry its right of recourse against borrowers but the insurers would not look to subrogate their rights, and the part of the claim we have paid may not need to be recovered from the borrower.