Ms Julie Sadlier:

May I answer that? Voluntary surrender is the thing to worry about most. From our own statistics and on close analysis of the Central Bank, which does not in fact deal with those statistics at all, we see that the biggest worry concerns those voluntary surrender letters. From what we see ourselves, we think that in most cases a number of legal letters will move on to proceedings. One must remember the terror this now has caused for families. They are packing the boxes but do not know where they are going and one must keep remembering the whole family home aspect. People are not necessarily telling their children that they are moving and are trying to live with this and to juggle it. The 33% we see that concern letters of voluntary surrender - that is up to 50,000 cases if one translates that into national figures - are the really worrying ones because we have no idea. We have no way of measuring who is handing back the key, who is moving out, who is going on the housing lists, how they are getting onto the housing lists or where they are going next. Some are moving in with parents temporarily in the belief they will get on a housing list. The chaos is beginning, but it is hard to quantify.