Mr. Paul Joyce:

We plan further days of that nature. It might be interesting for members to attend and listen to the deliberations. Deputy Doherty's Bill will only deal with one aspect of this problem and I think he knows that. What it purports to do is at least to seek the borrower's consent for his or her loan to be sold, which might not be withheld. Individual borrowers might say that they do not mind their loan being sold because the way the vulture fund might deal with them or their financial circumstances might be such that it might be in their interests for the loan to be sold. If loans were never sold to vulture funds and if vulture funds did not exist, we would still have the fundamental problem of loans that have been in arrears for a long time. The number of people in the two years plus category is 27,500. Mr. Hall knows that we wrote to the Insolvency Service of Ireland and the Department of Justice and Equality a few years ago asking whether we could look at the profile. The Central Bank is carrying out a review and seeking information from the likes of us. We need an awful lot more detail about the two years plus category of arrears. They are the dangerous cases.