Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

We will agree to disagree. Obviously, this is also a Government policy matter, but it is also Government policy to allow AIB the freedom to make these decisions. I believe AIB is making the wrong decisions, because unless we get radical debt write-down, we will continue to bump along the bottom. I believe AIB is failing to grasp the significant influence it has on whether we will have the recovery AIB hopes will arrive magically. AIB is part of the solution or the problem in the context of producing the recovery.

To what extent is AIB policy in this regard connected to the fact that its objective is to resell the bank and make it attractive to private investors? I see this as part of the problem and see these two issues as connected. In so far as AIB has responded - not sufficiently in my opinion - to some public pressure in terms of how it operates and its willingness to pass on ECB interest reductions, that has to do with the fact AIB is now in public ownership and more subject to public pressure. However, in the opinion of many, AIB is not responding fast enough or significantly enough to that public pressure and this has to do with the fact AIB is trying to make itself attractive to private investors. Is that a reasonable assumption?