Mr. Lorcan O'Connor:

I will take the last set of questions first. We have helped more than 1,000 people do PIAs and more than 3,000 people overall in the suite of solutions we provide. For those people it has been hugely valuable. Much of the feedback we have received is that it is life-changing or has even saved lives in some cases because we are dealing with such a sensitive subject. I would, however, have expected the numbers to be higher than they are, given what we have come through in recent years. Ours is a new organisation and it takes time for people to become familiar with the solutions, but we do need to work on communications.

Since the ISI opened, approximately 120,000 informal deals have been done by creditors. That number was zero before we opened. When people in mortgage arrears rang their banks to ask to talk and do something about it, the banks said they would phone them back when they were ready. All the negotiating power was on the banks' side, whereas as soon as we opened, the debtors were able to tell banks they would like to meet to try to do a mutually beneficial deal, and if the banks would not, they could say they would go to the insolvency service. It was an important catalyst or change point whereby all of a sudden it was in the interests of banks to start doing informal deals. There is no issue with informal deals if they are sustainable, but at least people have the option of going to the personal insolvency practitioner.

Deputy Coppinger asked if the reasonable living expenses were feeding into the low numbers. We have found that in the majority of cases people have been living on far less than we would allow until they have engaged with a PIP.

As a result of the fact that they have been doing their best to pay off as much as possible every week, they have really been going in tight in terms of the amount of money they have available for food, clothing and so on. Our legislation specifies that a reasonable standard of living includes contributing to society and having an amount that can be saved each week for a rainy day, as well as social and other expenditure. It is not an easy amount to live on, yet we are finding that it is more than what a lot of people have been living on for the previous few years. It is a threshold below which no bank or creditor can force someone to live. That is not necessarily the case in other situations.

On fees, our feedback from debtors is a perception that it will cost money to avail of this solution. My message today is that it is free. It does not cost money to engage with a personal insolvency practitioner now that we have this new service. We will do our best to sing that from the rooftops because it will hopefully result in more and more people availing of the solutions.

Deputy O'Dowd mentioned the statistics relating to Dublin and Waterford. Perhaps we are not making it quite as clear as we should. The statistics do not identifying different acceptance rates. Rather, they reflect the number of people availing of solutions by county. In County Waterford, per 1,000 of population, there are three times as many people applying as is the case in Dublin. However, acceptance rates are not broken down by county. We do not have that information. It is simply activity levels rather than actual acceptance rates.