Mr. Brendan Burgess:

There are three categories of mortgage that ended up with the vulture funds. The first were the performing loans that were customers of Danske Bank and Bank of Scotland Ireland. They left the country and they sold those loans. We are not terribly worried about those because they are, generally speaking, on very good tracker mortgage rates. While they are paying a lot more than they were a year ago, they have had ten very good years. They are fully performing. At the other end, we have people who were in deep arrears on their mortgages. They were probably paying very little, and the banks just had to get them off their books. The banks were unable to repossess the house, deal with them or get them to pay any more money so the banks just had to sell the loans as part of the restructuring programme.

Then there is a group in the middle, primarily 6,000 Permanent TSB customers who did what they were asked to do, they engaged with Permanent TSB and Permanent TSB did what it was asked to do, it gave these guys long-term solutions. They restructured those mortgages, usually with a split mortgage where some of it was warehoused and there was no interest or repayment on it. Some 90% were performing fully and paying that mortgage and the Central Bank came along and said it was defining those as non-performing loans and the bank must sell them. Permanent TSB said that they were very profitable loans and that it was getting a monthly repayment on them and it would be able to review the warehoused part of the loan in time and get them back fully but the Central Bank said: "No, get those off your books" and to make a provision in full, which would have wiped out PTSB or to sell them. Those are the people I feel particularly distressed about. They did what they were asked. These are our neighbours. Members know many of these people but they would not know that they are in arrears or that they have any difficulty. Those mortgages have been sold and that was an absolute disgrace.