Mr. Edmund Honohan:

In one of the suggested questions I have put forward, I pointed to the fact that there are three templates. There is reference to the templates of factors for cram-down in the insolvency Acts, the Land and Conveyancing Law Reform (Amendment) Act 2019 and the SCARP legislation for small SMEs. The Deputy is familiar with that. These are all templates that can be engaged on an algorithmic basis to determine how much a borrower can afford, the timeframe, the cost and so on. The information is put it into the machine and it produces a result. These templates are available, but the directive requires Ireland to create a system which obliges the lender to operate forbearance on the basis of some structure that must be accountable and accessible to the public. When the 2021 directive arrived on a desk in the Department - the Department was involved in the drafting of it anyway - the Department should have realised there was a template in the context of the 2019 Act and it could have been used. It could have been cut and pasted in. There was not that realisation. The Department could have decided to leave it there for two years and then just do a standard reproduction while relabelling the type at the top. I have not seen the statutory instrument that will emerge. I wrote to the Minister to tell him the problem is that we will be going back to the land agent and the foreign land owner. I told the Minister he should not be doing this by statutory instrument. I have not yet seen the statutory instrument but I know he will go down the route of dealing with this by way of statutory instrument because it is the convenient way of doing so. Unfortunately, doing it in that way encapsulates the procedures and legal entitlement in a document the courts will never see.