Ms Francesca McDonagh:

The commitment that I had made was to contact all of the original 600 customers we had identified to offer them money in their account by the end of the year.

We thought doing it before Christmas was the right thing to do. It was only on 9 November that we agreed to include the additional 6,000. We made every effort to inform the customers at least that they would be part of the redress and compensation scheme. One can imagine that with a number that size we worked very hard, using not just our people but cutting edge technology on robotics to try to process the individual letters as quickly as possible. Our commitment is to have contacted those customers by 31 March, save perhaps for some extreme cases, such as the people we have not been able to trace, particularly people who have moved beyond Ireland.