Mr. Jim O'Keeffe:

It comes down to engagement. The sale on any of the loans we have on the private dwelling house side, and the same applies across the board, would only come after a sustained and lengthy period of trying to engage with the borrowers. We must have reached a point whereby we could not get the level of engagement to create a restructure.

We struggled as we went through them because some customers could sustain only very low levels of debt. They were engaging with us but they could sustain very little, and that is why, along with the Irish Mortgage Holders Organisation, we reinvigorated the mortgage-to-rent scheme, which proved very beneficial for us with that grouping. We carried out an extensive outreach campaign, as we mentioned in our document, to try to reach every borrower. We communicated strongly to the borrowers to say that if we could not get engagement or a solution, that would leave us in a position where we would have to sell the loans.

It was not that we did not try to find an alternative; rather, we could not get to solutions with the borrowers at that point. In the intervening time, when we look back at the €30 billion that was there, any of the loan sales we carried out were on the investment side, moving through buy-to-let properties and so on, before we moved on to family homes.