Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 1 December 2016

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach

Banking Sector in Ireland: Ulster Bank

9:30 am

Mr. Gerry Mallon:

Maybe I can explain because there are important distinctions there. First, what we have not reached is the total number of people who are impacted by this. We are working through the portfolio and when we have gone through it and looked at exactly who was communicated and under what circumstances as well as how those people were treated, we will reach a final number. The number of approximately 2,000 to which I referred is the number that we have arrived at at the moment in terms of the biggest and, we believe, most significant cohorts of the people who were subject to certain conditions and certain communications in a particular way. That was what I meant by not having finally arrived at a figure. It is very much a live situation. It is a complex process of working through each case individually to try to work out what has happened. This number will continue to develop but I hope it will not be a dramatic increase.

Second, I was just trying to respond to the question of who we thought may have lost their homes as a consequence of having been put on the wrong tracker rate. We know out of the identified population that we have either 14 or 15 people among the population that we have identified so far who have certainly and very regrettably lost their homes.