Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Let me acknowledge I thought Permanent TSB's presentation was excellent. It included interesting data on those in pre-arrears and those in arrears over 90 days that the bank has brought them to below the industry average. That is positive.

The problem here is Permanent TSB is about to throw its own customers' families to the wolves, to the mercy of the vulture funds. That is the serious problem here. It seems as if much of this is technicality. It seems much of this is because of the rules of the ECB, but also of the sloppy work, if this is the case, in the way that Permanent TSB has structured some loans.

Permanent TSB is a State-owned institution. AIB is a State-owned institution. We have a responsibility to try and keep those loans within the State within a regulated entity and ensure that there is a duty of care to our customers. Permanent TSB spends a great deal on legal advice. Surely it is able to find out how AIB structures its loans. How, as they say, could AIB have possibly circumvented the rules and found a different definition than Permanent TSB? This is a significant tranche of the 6,279 split mortgages that are deemed currently as non-performing that, if they were structured in another way, could possibly be deemed as performing. Surely that is something Permanent TSB could be working on over the next three years instead of stating to the borrowers that even though theirs are performing loans, it has made a bit of a mess here in how it structured them and it is selling them off to the vultures. Is that an option that Mr. Masding could look at?