Professor Patrick Honohan:

It is an important question. It has not been our aim to achieve perfect consistency but to meet minimum, but high, requirements. We want to insist that borrowers get sustainable solutions and that these involve restructuring, where possible. It is all set out and I am only paraphrasing. We are setting standards that must be met by the banks but we are not saying how they are to meet them. If we said how they are to meet them, we would end up with a weaker solution. We have over 100 people dealing with banks, including the foreign-owned banks. We cannot specify exactly what should be done by each bank. We are setting minimum standards that I believe are good. The result may be that some borrowers will be fortunate enough to get an even better treatment than our minimum. As the Deputy implied, however, we open the door to many different approaches. As these approaches gain traction and we get more actual cases, banks will learn from one another what works and what does not. That is the current position. If we knew there was a very precise model that worked everywhere, we would be happy to impose it. However, to impose one at present would not be effective. On which bank would the Deputy like us to model our specification? It is not really like that.