Mr. Gerry Mallon:

We are very deep into the review of that mortgage book at the moment so I will give a bit of background to the issue. We are trying to identify cases where we failed to honour the contractual entitlements of customers or to live up to the standards we and the regulator would have wanted in terms of full disclosure of transparent information, so that the rate to which given customers were entitled was clear to them. It is in the second area, namely, the need to be unambiguous about information and to avoid the potential for confusion in customer's minds, that we have not lived up to our standards and where we, as a bank, have an issue.

I have apologised to all the affected customers for this and I reiterate that apology today. This was something that was wrong and we do not want to see this kind of issue. Customer service, trust and customers advocating on our behalf make up the fundamental basis for the development of our bank in the future. We cannot have this kind of issue in the future. It is a very complicated process because we are working through every individual case to understand how customers were communicated with, what their situation was and so on. Approximately 200 people are working on it at the moment and we are continuing to add people to that number. It is important that we get it right and attain the standards we and the regulator would want. The final number of customers has not yet been concluded because we are continuing to work all the way through it but we will be writing to the first cohort, which we believe is substantial, this month. We will looking to implement immediate steps to rectify the rates on their accounts. We will continue to keep working on that into 2017. It will be into 2017 before we have worked through the entire portfolio and determined what the full extent of it is. I am not in a position to give the Deputy any final number.