Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 29 April 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Mr. Michael Buckley:

The concerns were generalised concerns about the mortgage market where LTVs in particular were going, loan-to-value ratios and our response - we would have been a bank who was dragged up the curve by the market in terms of LTVs, because the pace was set by Bank of Scotland, by Ulster Bank, other banks like that and I remember very clearly that our reports back to the regulator would say, "Yes we do give some 90% mortgages", of whatever number we would have been using, but we are very careful that our policies in relation to giving those sort of mortgages confined them to either to applicants, who are in a special place by virtue of their jobs and their career prospects, let's say, people in certain professions and second of all, people who were getting significant support from family sources to, in a sense, supplement deposits and things like that, or supplement their repayment capacity.