Mr. Jim O'Keeffe:

Good morning, Chairman and members. As Bernard Byrne said, we have 38,000 mortgage restructures in place. We have 13,000 customers who are post 90 days past due in our private dwelling or owner-occupier mortgages which, as the Deputy pointed out, is still a significant number of customers in difficulty. The challenge for us is that it is about engagement. We have been working very hard on engagement because we recognise that borrowers, for various reasons, find it difficult to engage with the bank. We have worked with the Irish Mortgage Holders Organisation, IMHO, StepChange and various organisations. That engagement is critical to us working through this portfolio. In the engagement we have had with the IMHO, where people feel that they can have independent engagement with ourselves, funded by ourselves, we have had almost 3,000 customers come through that and we have put solutions in place for over 2,500. They would have been customers that we would have seen within the cadre of customers who were not willing to engage and work with us.

As the committee will see from the documentation, we have almost 7,000 customers out of the broad group of 13,000 that are at various stages of the legal process. The legal process and repossession are a tiny part of the solution. When we look at the scale of repossessions that have taken place, from our perspective, and on an industry level, compared to the amount of restructures that have happened, it is about 1%. When one looks at the volume of restructures that have happened in the bank through 2015, for example, nearly 48,000 restructures occurred and close to 700 repossessions took place and some of those would have been voluntary.

Engagement is critical. One can see from the list that we have a wide range of solutions. Even in the legal process when we look back to 2015 we see that between 20% and 25% of that grouping re-engaged with us and in the vast majority of cases we were able to find solutions for them. As we move forward what will be critical for everybody is that either directly with ourselves or through engagement with third parties, people are encouraged to come forward to the banks to find solutions.