Ms Madeleine Reid:

Yes I can do that. We have been running the Abhaile scheme together with the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection since July 2016. We are just finalising a report on the outcomes after two years, which will go to the Government shortly and the data I will provide is a little foretaste of that. We hope that once the report goes to the Government it will be published very quickly.

The question was about the impact on the mortgage arrears problem. The Abhaile scheme is targeted in particular at those who are in the worst mortgage arrears, those who are in immediate risk of repossession on their homes. That would be the cohort who are in arrears equivalent to two years of repayments, who are over the 720 days category as set down by the Central Bank.

As Mr. McKenna said, that category has been dropping, but it is the slowest to reduce and that is the hard coalface really in addressing the mortgage arrears problem. It peaked at the end of June 2015 and it has gone down considerably at this stage. The Central Bank figure at the of June this year was 28,000 household accounts, which is probably equivalent to approximately 25,000 homes, because the Central Bank counts mortgage accounts which include top-ups and second mortgages. If we take it that there are 25,000 households that are at serious risk of repossession, we have 10,000 households already in receipt of financial advice and help under the Abhaile programme and that is having a significant impact.