Mr. Gary Tobin:

The situation the Senator describes is one with which everyone would have a lot of sympathy. In the past couple of days, the Department of Finance, in conjunction with the ESRI, published new economic research around the potential impact of interest rate increases, including the possibility of people going into mortgage arrears. The reason we carried out that research is because interest rates are at historically low levels right now but inevitably in the medium to long-term they will normalise and increase.