Mr. David Hall:

To go back to Deputy O’Callaghan's earlier question, there are big practical differences between dealing with a mainstream bank and dealing with a vulture fund. This is human stuff. It is basic humanity. These are people who do and do not have the capability and competency to deal with financial matters in general. These are people who have the capacity and intelligence to be a senior lawyer, politician, or anything in the country, but when it comes to debt, banks and financial stuff, they just get surrounded by this cloud that causes great difficulty.

It can be difficult to deal with a bank that is a regulated entity that has structures in place and is governed by the Central Bank, as weak as they may be on occasion, but let us compare that with even trying to find an office for a vulture fund and then trying to deal with a service agent. Then, as Mr. Kissane mentioned, one could have one's loan sold three separate times. There are vast differences. Vulture funds do not provide restructuring arrangements in the same way as a bank. One cannot get certain restructuring arrangements such as a split mortgage or a fixed-rate mortgage and other such products. Vulture funds are less inclined to deal with insolvency arrangements.

Some are better at dealing with insolvency arrangements than others. On a human level, there is a vast difference. There is no ongoing relationship and no top-up loan available. It is a whole host of small things to individuals that are big things to customers.

On the loans on the mortgages and the prices, the average sold in Ireland is probably 50%. I have been involved in two bids. Without breaching any confidences on the specific costs and charges that were levied and what we gave, I think 50% would be about average. As mentioned earlier, it is very important to remember this when talking about a vulture fund having bought something and charging someone extortionate interest rates. Vulture funds will have bought a €300,000 loan for, say, €150,000, particularly where it was a distressed loan, although they may have paid more for a performing loan, to be fair. They either borrowed or did not borrow, as the case may be. Is it our business what the vulture funds did? That is their own business. They got involved in a gamble and that is their business. Many of them would have pumped in money from pension funds so there were no strained marketplace borrowings. They paid 50% but those loans were not offered to individual customers. None of the main Irish banks offered those individual options to customers or wrote down their loans by 50%. That is the despicable nature of what happened at the time.