Michael Noonan (Limerick City, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

On the issue of the independent agency, first, there will be a director of the personal insolvency agency who will implement the provisions of the insolvency Act with the personal insolvency practitioners. He is independent under the law passed by this House. The driver of this will be the Central Bank which is independent under statute and the Constitution. It has co-operated with us in setting out the targets. It will take ownership of setting the targets for completed arrangements which are sustainable. It will make those announcements in the summer time.

We accepted some of the ideas the Deputy brought forward in debates. It is important there would be an independent approach. We have it through the director of the personal insolvency agency and the Central Bank exercising its independent function to deal with this. I hope with this we can arrive at a solution.

However, I am not underplaying the difficulties of which we all aware. It is a quantifiable difficulty. I met the boards of all the banks the week before last. In the course of my conservation with the board of AIB, one of the directors asked me if I realised the average arrears in AIB across 35,000 mortgages comes to €13,000. That means half of them are below that and half of them are above that. If the arrears are of that area, then there should be readily available solutions for quite a lot of people to resolve their problems. Others will have more difficulty but we will work systematically through it. The Central Bank will drive it.

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