Fergus O'Dowd (Louth, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the work being done by the insolvency service and the excellent results. Mr. O'Connor referred to some statistics on pages 12,13 and 14 of his document. If I am not reading these correctly, please tell me straight away. However, if I am reading the first statistics correctly, it seems that people with mortgage difficulties in certain counties have a higher chance of success than those in other counties. That seems to me very strange. People in Waterford seem to have a 22% success rate in doing deals, if that is the correct way of reading the figures, compared with those in Dublin city who have a 6.2% rate of success. Are there geographic issues? The insolvency service seems to have worked out the figures nationally by county. Why did the service do that?

Are some mortgage lenders far more open to doing deals than others? My colleague, Deputy Durkan, raised the question of people who may have overstretched or borrowed from a difficult financial base and who may have got more money than they should have got from some of the less-well-known mortgage companies. They borrowed at extremely high rates even at the best of times. Does the service have issues with companies which will not do business? Does the service tend to do less business with some companies compared with others? Should we not go after those? I have no wish to name names, but I know there are some companies which charge higher interest rates than others. Are they inclined to do deals or do they push the client to the wall? Perhaps Mr. O'Connor will comment on that.