Mr. Jerry Beades:

It is very hard to answer that question. We are dealing with the matter every day of the week and note that there is a complete lack of reality. We met Ms Sharon Donnery, now the Deputy Governor, ten years ago. I am astonished she has reached Deputy Governor level because of where she was positioned in the earlier days at the time of Mr. Patrick Neary. The whole Department she ran was not fit for purpose. We could not engage. One could tell the Department a story but one never got an answer back. We found from the banking inquiry, etc., that it did nothing. The same people are appearing again. I was astonished to see Ms Donnery appear at some of the committee meetings here. Nothing has changed from our perspective.

The Senator referred to the statistics and the numbers. What alarms me more is that the statistics being fed out here are so wrong. In the context of where we have come from and the statistics we put together, we conclude 4,000 self-employed people basically vanished. They were not allowed to sign on for welfare and some emigrated. They are still out there and we still meet them. They still come to our offices and they are down in the courts. They are not entitled to anything but they are there. I reckon, therefore, that the number of people in financial difficulty is closer to 500,000. Some 2 million people pay tax and work in the State. Some 25% of the population, or thereabouts, is affected directly.

Let me give some other statistics. We have an office at the back of the Four Courts. Much of what we do is low profile and we are not telling everybody we have fairly sophisticated organisations in different sections, or otherwise. In a three-month period last year, 1,045 people walked in the door of our office and I got the staff to keep statistics on them. Of those who came in, there was nobody under 29. A 29 year old now was 19 ten years ago and was not borrowing money. There is a whole generation of people up to the age of 30 something who do not have financial debt. Some 200 of the people who came to our office, or 20%, were between 30 and 40. They range from gardaí to civil servants and others right across the spectrum. All are in debt. I called into the office one day and met a young woman with two children and a pram who owed €7 million to a bank. It is just astonishing what we see.