Mr. Brian Hayes:

There are about 80,000 mortgages in the credit servicing area, as the Deputy knows. Some 26,000 of them are in long-term arrears. Some 35,000 of them are in the middle of an alternative repayment arrangement, ARA. The figure of 22,000 came from substantial correspondence received by Deputy Doherty from the Central Bank, estimating that 22,000 were never non-performing as such. Of course there are reasons performing loans would go from banks to credit servicing firms. In the case of banks that leave the market, such as Bank of Scotland, the whole book is actually sold as performing or non-performing. We are working off the figure that was sent to Deputy Doherty. I think that figure was 22,027 in total. Our estimate, because we do not know the full composition of the 22,000, is that they are mainly tracker mortgages with a small outstanding balance. One could legitimately ask why someone who has a tracker mortgage in a credit servicing firm which has always been performing - at a rate of 6% or 6.5% now, or even more - would not want to move to fix with one of our three pillar banks, or indeed one of our three non-bank lenders, where they would get it at substantially less. That is a question for those people to answer. Maybe the balance is so small that they have chosen to remain with their tracker. I have heard people talk about their attachment to the tracker but there is no reason those people cannot switch. They could have switched before our recent announcement but we have not seen that happen. I would imagine that not all of the 22,000 are trackers. There could be others who were in an ARA but have come out of that and are in that book as well.