People who took out loans to finance trips to the World Cup did not always declare the real reason for their borrowing, lending institutions now believe.
Several credit union branches contacted by The Irish Times said they had received no loan applications on which customers declared they were borrowing to fund trips to Japan or Korea. However, the credit union representatives said they believed loans for this purpose were given out.
"They are putting it down as for home improvements and holidays, so we wouldn't have a clue how many are taking the money out for World Cup trips," a spokeswoman for Tallaght and District Credit Union in Dublin said. "Not one of them will say it's for the World Cup in case of refusal," she added.
A spokeswoman for the An Post Credit Union said applicants for loans did not have to specify other than in general terms what their loan was for. If they said it was for a holiday, there was no way of knowing whether the holiday was to Japan or Spain, she said.
A credit union branch in Galway said it had not been asked for any World Cup loans. "If they did [take out the loan to fund the trip] they did not tell us," a spokeswoman said.
"They might not necessarily tell us the real reason for a loan," said another credit union worker in Cork.
Allied Irish Banks' group press officer, Mr Trevor McEvoy, said the bank's figure for amounts borrowed in personal loans in recent months was not broken down to indicate what the money was used for.
"They are just classified as personal borrowings but anecdotally there haven't been reports from branches of people coming in in droves looking for World Cup loans. Some people might have borrowed for the World Cup but not given it as the reason," he said.
The amount of money given out by financial institutions to finance trips to Japan and Korea might never be known, he said. "In reality we can only estimate afterwards how much was given out on the basis of what we have been told by customers. But how realistic that figure would be, you would wonder," Mr McEvoy said.
Mr David Slattery, marketing manager of consumer loans at Bank of Ireland, said some customers would have borrowed to travel to Japan but he did not know how many.