Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Independent)
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As an aside - I do not know if it is possible - in terms of the budget preparation, there is a piece of information which I understand is released at the weekend of the Budget Statement, the 2013 no-policy-change scenario. Any budget preparation or budget submission requires that. Perhaps it is a Government decision rather than a Department decision, but if it is possible perhaps Mr. Moran would consider releasing the no-policy-change document, which describes what would happen if we continued on without change for next year. Obviously, when one is trying to figure out the deltas and the ratios, the €3.5 billion and so forth, one needs a no-policy-change scenario. If it was possible to accelerate its release, it would be very useful.

I am spending a great deal of time on the Personal Insolvency Bill at present. If it is going to work, it will require a massive change in the position of the banks. Mr. Richie Boucher appeared before the committee last week and his performance was outrageous. I lived and worked in the UK for a number of years and, in my view, if the chief executive of a UK bank had treated a House of Commons select committee in the way he treated this committee, there would be widespread calls for his or her resignation. He refused to answer my question as to whether Bank of Ireland had engaged in any debt surrender on unsustainable mortgages, even though he answered the question before. He also refused to say whether Bank of Ireland would even consider the possibility of debt surrender as part of personal insolvency legislation. Mr. Masding, the chief executive of Permanent TSB, essentially said the same. We know AIB has done very little in that regard. We have seen a consistent and robust position from the banks which states that they will surrender nothing unless absolutely forced to do so. The personal insolvency legislation does not force them to do anything, which definitely makes the negotiation more interesting. Is Mr. Moran satisfied that the banks will significantly change their approach in terms of debt surrender?