Professor Patrick Honohan:

My point is that there are roughly 100,000 cases and there needs to be a mechanism for dealing with these cases which takes account of the individual household conditions and maps them into solutions. We cannot sit in the Central Bank and say, for example, that by next week a bank must give debt relief to some people and get other people to pay their debts. We must ensure that the banks are doing that job. They must do the job. The Central Bank cannot take the Chairman's constituents or anyone else's constituents and deal with them, one by one. That is the job of the individual banks. That is why we have banks and we must make sure the banks have the machinery to do that, with or without the Personal Insolvency Act. Now that we have the PIA it should put more pressure on the banks, in addition to the pressure that we are putting on them in the ways available to us.