Mr. Richie Boucher:

I have a wide range of responsibilities and I have confidence in my colleagues.

With regard to the Senator's general question as to whether the bank's credit appetite has changed, I think one always has to be careful of ensuring the pendulum does not swing too far one way or the other. One has to learn the lessons the bank had in the past because we are a bank with an approved EU restructuring plan. As part of an approved EU restructuring plan, one has to confirm the mistakes one made, what one has done about them and how one has fixed them. The biggest issue we had was an over reliance on wholesale funding and running with too thin capital and that has been assessed and confirmed by the EU. Our plan had been to address those. The generation of that capital, which we have generated from the private sector, has been to meet our ambition. These are people who believe the Irish economy will recover. They wanted to put capital to work in Ireland and they felt our bank would be a good place to get that to work because they felt in a growing economy a bank that had an ambition to meet those objectives would generate profit for them. Heretofore, they have been proved right.

With regard to the question of whether our branch managers or underwriters have become gun shy, Mr. McLoughlin and his colleagues look on an ongoing basis at the credit applications as they come in. They are assessed for the quality of assessment by individual branch managers who have measures for the quality of the applications they submit. For example, where customers are asked a question today, then another question tomorrow and another the following day, a key criterion is whether the first credit application contains all the appropriate information to enable the underwriter to turn around the decision very quickly. Are we asking the right questions and are we making the right judgments? We have learned about the different dynamics of different industry sectors. For example, we look at our credit risk appetite, we say what we think is happening in a sector and we give guidance and direction to branch managers in assessing that credit. For example, in the agriculture sector, we started a process three years ago - we have a little way to go - to recruit specialist agricultural advisers who do not just look at a farm's accounts from a balance sheet or a profit-loss perspective but who understand the dynamics of what a good farm looks like. They work with people. As Mr. McLoughlin mentioned, we have people who look at a motor dealership and what is happening there. We will adjust our credit appetite as to what we want to achieve there.