Mr. Colm Kincaid:

I will speak on the question about distressed debt, the sale of mortgages and the position for consumers, in particular and SMEs and others in that situation. As the Governor and Mr. Cross said, it is a priority area for us and has been for some time. This is because we recognise that for any person to find themselves in a position of arrears on a loan that is secured on the roof over their head is an incredibly distressful situation. Going right back to the financial crisis, we have been very proactive in putting in place a framework dedicated to dealing with those situations and requiring the institutions that we supervise to have arrears support units in place to deal with those, and to do so professionally.

We have also been very diligent in making sure that this framework applies not just to banks but also to non-bank lenders and to entities that service those loans. We have done that in our own frameworks and we have advocated at a legislative level for that. The very important message for consumers to have is that if a person or an SME has a mortgage, a loan, or an unsecured consumer loan that is covered by the rules of the Central Bank of Ireland, it will remain covered by the rules of the Central Bank of Ireland, regardless of who the loan is sold to. That loan can only be sold to somebody who is subject to the supervision of the Central Bank of Ireland. That is a very important point for people to understand.

As Mr. Cross said in his opening remarks, one of the areas we really want to see progress on this year is in long-term mortgage arrears. We still have a significant proportion of long-term mortgage arrears. These are cases where loans are in arrears of more than one year, where it is argued that considerable progress can be made by the lenders. We have taken those loan books, broken them down and compartmentalised them into groupings of customers. We say to the institutions that these customers seem to us to be in a position where they should be able to reach an agreement with those consumers, and particularly given the narrative that we hear from lenders of how difficult it can be to repossess or enforce property in Ireland. Our narrative back to that is that if that is the case, and given how we have broken down these books, there is considerable scope for improvement.

Members will see in the figures we published this morning that there continues to be reduction in mortgage arrears. We would also say that we have always been struck by the extent to which that reduction tends to come about because of specific interventions by the teams in my area and in Ms McMunn's area in dealing with those lenders. That will remain an area of focus for us, but with regard to the banks that are departing and the transfer of loans, the key message is that it does not change the protections that are there for borrowers. The purview of the Central Bank and the work we will be doing will be on those loan books regardless of where they move to. The Central Bank would be very engaged across that.