Mr. Alan Dukes:

There is no concerted view among all the banks on how they deal with their particular loan books. I imagine any attempt to do that would be frowned on by the authorities. We regard ourselves as policy takers. We operate within the framework of policy as it is. The Government said it wanted the MARS policy, the Central Bank laid down guidelines and we put that in place. The shareholder told us to wind down the bank in ten years without burning the capital reserve and that is what we set out to do. Within that framework, we deal with each particular connection we have in the way that seems to us to get the best return out of the situations we find. It is not always easy to figure out how to do it.

In regard to personal insolvency legislation, I do not know, and nobody can know, at this stage how it will work out. We have to see the final shape and how things move through it. I believe it will have some effect on how the MARS programme works when we see how the dynamics of the process work out. We will have to review our financing models when we see the results of the programme. There is clearly going to be some margin of choice in individual cases as to how they work out, but we will have to make the same kind of commercial judgment on how we treat the loan as we do now with some new factors coming into play. I do not know if there is any appetite on the part of policymakers to impose a single set of approaches to any part of this. I have not seen any evidence of it.