Mr. Brian Hayes:

It does. It was actually a reply to the question I posed at the time. A determination had not been reached on the proposal by Permanent TSB when it asked that its split mortgages be considered. Ms Nouy is making a differentiation. She is saying that there are two elements to the payment, namely, the active amount and the warehousing amount. She is regarding the active amount as the senior and the warehousing amount as the more junior, meaning greater collateral is required. In our circumstances and given the way Permanent TSB operates, as I understand it, one is paying both at the same time. As I understand it, Ms Nouy is expecting the active amount to be paid in its totality and then regarding it as outside the loop of the non-performing loans. That is a difficulty I do not believe we have resolved yet.

I have seen newspaper reports in this regard from sources here and abroad. I very much hope a definitive view can be given on this. As the Deputy knows from his work here, not all non-performing loans are the same. Equally, not all banking legacy problems are the same. The one-size-fits all approach, which I understand the SSM is trying to move towards, may not help our situation here.

There was a great expectation in Brussels up until recently that there would be a move towards a more exacting standard. The 5% is a guideline rather than a standard. Ultimately, Permanent TSB and others that still have a capital reserve problem are working with the SSM teams in this regard. As they tried to work out the problem, there was an expectation that a very exacting standard would be published by March. That has not happened. There is still a long way to go, largely because the Italian problem is worse than ours. Quite frankly, it is the unknown quantity in terms of the capital reserve ratios that remain. I hope we can achieve some progress on this but I am not pretending I am very optimistic at the moment.