Mr. John Hogan:

In my opening statement I referred to the fact that in March the Minister indicated that he would bring forward this legislation and at that time he indicated, and has done so consistently throughout the year, that his intention was to publish it by the end of the year. That is still our intention. What we needed to do from the outset was to assess the playing field and understand the implications of particular decisions we might take in terms of the legislative provisions we bring forward. It was important for us, given the public interest in the sale of these loan books, that we would have a period of consultation. We took the decision to do that through the course of July and August of this year. Following the feedback we got on the consultation, it was also incumbent on us to understand if the initial framing we had done in terms of how we thought the legislation might be prepared, drafted and enacted was consistent with ensuring that protections were there for the borrowers. The consultation period gave us some pause for thought and led us to the conclusion that we needed to alter the approach we wanted to take. As I said in my opening statement, we engaged with a number of stakeholders on that. We also engaged with some authorities in the UK.
We often look at other jurisdictions, although sometimes the background and circumstances are not necessarily equally aligned. We took soundings from UK authorities as to the approach adopted there. We have been engaged, it is fair to say, very intensively over the last number of months with the Central Bank and the Attorney General's office on the drafting and articulation of the policy approach that we want to achieve through the legislation which we expect to publish by the end of the year. On this particular Bill, we are very anxious to get it right. We see it as important and the Minister has identified it as such. He also indicated, in order to manage expectations as much as possible, that it would be published by the end of the year in order to give us sufficient time to engage in various consultations and work with the Attorney General's office and to prepare the legislation to achieve our objective which is, effectively, to put those people who were in a certain position vis-à-vistheir lenders in the same position after the loan books were sold