Mr. Vasileios Madouros:

I apologise as I would not comment on individual institutions generally. The issues around what is happening to the supply of credit are ones that we look at very closely, both for businesses and SMEs as well as households.

On SMEs, one of the key sources of information we have is from the Department of Finance in the context of its credit demand survey. That gives us a sense of whether what we see in terms of credit outcomes is driven mainly by demand factors, that is, low credit demand, or credit supply, which might include, for example, rejections of applications. The overall trend in recent years has been one of relatively and continuously subdued demand for credit by the SME sector.

In the mortgage market we have seen a general increase in recent years of both approvals and mortgage drawdowns. I think there is some material in the quarterly bulletin. Mortgage drawdowns last year were a little more than €10.5 billion. We also have another example of past analysis showing that approvals are consistently higher than drawdowns. Part of the reason is that people get mortgage approvals but are then unable to find a place to purchase because of the limited supply. I think that goes back to some of the underlying issues around the imbalance between supply and demand.