Mr. Jim O'Keeffe:

If we step back from this for a moment, in the traditional world of banking when you got to a situation where you were not able to recover debt, you went down the legal route. You would have typically sought the court to support the recovery of that. When the bank was gifted the bail-out in order to support customers through that period, the focus was on trying to move everybody forward at a greater pace to support that. That was the real request of the banks. The Keane report, which put forward solutions, then came out. A huge amount of work was done at the regulatory and industry levels to put solutions in place that were different from what went before, so we could move things along. As a result, the bank put in place policies, strategies and treatments for customers that would allow us to deal with that debt and move it along in the knowledge that if we went to personal insolvency, which did not exist in the initial phases, or to the courts, we would not get a better outcome in any event. That was the reason we put them in place. Our action has resulted in 150,000 customers having sustainable solutions today. When customers differ with us, it may be because of debts they have with other institutions. That can often be some of the reason they go for personal insolvency arrangements. When they go to that, we are not against that and nor do we punish the borrower for that in any shape or fashion. The Senator will see from our numbers that we have done 4,300 personal insolvency arrangements. We would be viewed as being very strong in terms of supporting decisions within the personal insolvency function. I do not see these as either-or solutions. Some borrowers need the comfort of being able to say that they do not think they are getting a good deal with the bank and want proof that they are, and so they go through the personal insolvency process. I see it as a continuum. It is not that we are against it. We engage proactively with the personal insolvency process in order that people can also deal with their wider debt.