Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Thank you. I would like to move on to mortgage arrears. As Mr. Boucher knows, I have been consistently very critical of Bank of Ireland’s approach to mortgage arrears. We will go into the numbers in a minute but I want to talk about the tone. When I talk to people involved in helping borrowers, be they commercial, not-for-profit or statutory operators, or at least funded by the public purse, and Bank of Ireland comes up, the words used for the bank’s approach to borrowers are “aggressive”, “unreasonable” and a word used to me this morning was “deplorable”. I know there are several personal insolvency practitioners, PIPs, who refuse referrals on Bank of Ireland cases because they say Bank of Ireland is impossible to deal with and they will not spend any time on it. As chief executive and senior manager of a bank with a very long tradition in this country, which has always had very positive relationships with the private sector and the community sector, and which was rescued at a particular point, how do Mr. Boucher and Mr. Mason respond when the bank they run is consistently, and pretty much unanimously, singled out for this sort of criticism, with words such as “aggressive”, “unreasonable” and “deplorable”?