Mr. Stephen Curtis:

I will return to Deputy Durkan's point about the people who cannot pay and those who will not pay. Something we have suggested for a number of years is the introduction of some sort of a certificate of affordability for anyone going into court or negotiations with the bank. It could be administered by personal insolvency practitioners or another body. It would say that a person is paying a certain amount, that it is all they can afford to pay, they can afford to pay more or they cannot afford to pay anything as the case may be. Our experience is that the vast majority of people who come to us are either paying as much as they can or more than they can and forgoing other things, for example not paying their electricity bills or not paying for groceries. That would be one very simple way of determining that. I have been dealing with this for the past three years with Mr. David Hall and for longer elsewhere. The reality is that the vast majority of people pay as much as they can because the consequence is that they will lose their house - people want to co-operate as much as they can.

In terms of our figures versus those of the Insolvency Service, ours are significantly higher so obviously we are not doing them through the Insolvency Service mechanism. The majority of them have been through informal negotiations. I am a personal insolvency practitioner, PIP, registered and licensed with the Insolvency Service, so I do not want to insult it too much. The reality is that the operation of the Insolvency Service for the types of people we are dealing with is far too cumbersome. In the last session, Deputy Collins asked how the PIP is paid. The reality is that for an insolvency arrangement to happen there needs to be a pot of money brought to the table by the debtor. That is what the PIP gets paid out of. The debtor does not necessarily write a cheque to the PIP, but the PIP is paid out of that pot. It goes through the creditors and back to the PIP. In order for insolvency arrangements to work on a wholesale scale, it requires money. PIPs are private operators; most of them are accountants or solicitors operating in a private practice. Being a PIP is a business, so If insolvency arrangements are to be done on a wholesale basis without a requirement for a profit to be made there should be public PIPs. There should be PIPs licensed and run by the Insolvency Service who would go to people who cannot fund a PIP and tell them they could probably do a deal and that the Insolvency Service has five, ten or 20 PIPs working for it and that they should go to one of them to implement it.

In terms of the cost of our proposal on rent allowance, in some ways it is quite hard to judge because there are a number of people against whom the banks are taking repossession proceedings. There are about 20,000 of them before the courts at the moment and a lot of those people will be eligible for social housing if and when their houses are repossessed. The cost to the State will range from about €650 a month to about €1,900 or more depending on what county one is in. Our estimate is that there are 20,000 at imminent risk of that happening, so €500 by 20,000 is the amount. The reality is that we do not know at the moment because nobody is paying it. They are sitting there not paying the banks because they cannot and are not being subsidised by the housing authority because they are still in their properties. If one wanted to solve the problem with mortgage to rent, one would go to the two State-owned banks, AIB and Permanent TSB, and ask them how many of the people they are currently taking to court who cannot pay anything will be eligible for social housing and will go into that system if and when they repossess their house. The two lenders could put a list together of all those properties and go to the approved housing bodies, the Clúids and Oaklees, and ask them to make an offer on the houses that are available. They could buy them and leave those people in their houses and let them stay there instead of this charade of them going through the court system where their properties will eventually get repossessed unless something happens.

I agree with Mr. Hall that it is a very slow process and thank God for that. There is a need for radical action in this area. We spent two full working weeks on one case before it was resolved. We have been at this now for 18 months. This is not the way to go if this issue, in its totality, is to be resolved.