Mr. Brendan Burgess:

One of the problems is that there are 600,000 mortgage holders in Ireland, 300,000 of whom have tracker mortgages. A new lender that enters the market will never be interested in those. There are 300,000 non-tracker mortgage holders, of whom at least 150,000 are either in negative equity, an LTV of more than 80%, arrears, a restructured loan, or their job has changed, or something else. The target mortgage book for a new lender is very small. It is no more than 150,000, and if a new lender got 10% of it, which would be an extraordinary achievement, it would be 15,000 borrowers which is not enough to sustain a large UK lender such as Nationwide. Nationwide could not come into the Irish market.