Mr. Paul Joyce:

There is X billion for rainy day funds. Is this a rainy day scenario? If people do not have the capacity to meet their repayments, given the increases in repayments, what happens next? It is that legal proceedings are issued and the number of the people in the courts increases. Something has to be done to stem the flow of difficulty here. As the Deputy said, if it is temporary and finite in some way, as the European Central Bank is suggesting, then whatever the investment is at the taxpayer’s expense may be worth making.

It is also very important, as the Deputy knows very well, that the European Central Bank has had a huge role in ensuring in some way that there is a credit servicing and loan sale infrastructure right across Europe. The reason the domestic institutions sold off loans to funds in the first place is that pressure was put on them that if they did not sell these loans and get them off their loan books, even more strict capital provisioning requirements would be imposed upon them which would affect their ability to carry out banking services in the first place.

There is a European dimension to this, as is shown by the credit services directive. I do not know whether the Central Bank of Ireland has approached the European Central Bank and let it know the extent of the difficulty we may be facing and that assistance is needed to deal with that.