  The presence of some X-ray sources in the Galactic Centre region which show
variability, but do not show outbursts in over a decade of monitoring has been
used to argue for the presence of a large population of stellar mass black
holes in this region. A core element of the arguments that these objects are
accreting black holes is the claim that neutron stars (NSs) in low mass X-ray
binaries (LMXBs) do not have long transient recurrence times. We demonstrate in
this paper that about half of the known transient LMXBs with clear signatures
for NS primaries have recurrence times in excess of a decade for outbursts at
the sensitivity of MAXI. We furthermore show that, in order to reconcile the
expected total population of NS LMXBs with the observed one and with the
millisecond radio pulsar (MSRP) population of the Galaxy, systems with
recurrence times well in excess of a century for outbursts detectable by
instruments like MAXI must be the dominant population of NS LMXBs, and that few
of these systems have yet been discovered.
