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

We are continuing to review the position, and we review it on an ongoing basis. The essential element of restructuring is agreement between the two sides. If there is no agreement, there can be no restructuring. There is a menu of arrangements available, not all of which are working as well as others. The enormity of the problem was such that it could not have been resolved at local level. Because of the scale of the problem, it had to be centralised. General rules had to apply and it had to be centralised to make progress. As I said earlier, 115,000 mortgages have been restructured. The local contact is built into the procedure and a person must be designated in each branch to deal with mortgage arrears. This point of contact is still available at a local level and it should be used by the kinds of people the Deputy has described.

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