Rose Conway Walsh (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister to the committee and wish him well in all of his various roles.

I want to focus on non-performing loans. I was taken aback when the Commission bluntly recommended that Ireland needed to encourage a more durable reduction in the value of non-performing loans through resolution strategies that involvd write-offs for viable businesses and households, with a special emphasis on resolving the issue of long-term arrears. Is the Commission telling us, almost a decade after the crash, that we need to get our act together? Its specific call for a policy of write-offs is unprecedented as we know that we have a Government which is simply not going to insist on it. What steps will the Minister take to implement that recommendation?