Mr. Dick Spring:

Obviously, if we can improve communications, that is all the better. To pick up on what the Chairman asked about, namely, the fact that we had not come before the committee, we are quite happy to do so. We are happy for the committee to formalise an exchange on an annual basis. It is important in an exchange such as this that we can get information to the public that might not normally be disseminated. I am not sure how interested people are in reading bank annual reports.

Apart from our fiduciary duties under company law, the Credit Institutions (Stabilisation) Act puts it all into a new ball game. As Dr. Somers has said, all directors are now practically public interest directors. I look on the public interest concept as being very wide in terms of making sure AIB is able to function. It is a pillar bank and a major bank in the State. It must be able to give credit. If a bank is not lending, it is not making money, and if it is not making money, then it is not viable. Without a functioning bank in the State, this country will not get back on its feet. To be blunt, it has been a horrendous journey from the crisis of 2008. The deputy governor of the central bank in the United Kingdom said that this crisis was of such magnitude that no politician, banker or economist currently alive has any experience of a crisis of such seriousness.

A total of 48 of the top management in the bank who were there during the crisis are gone. We are taking costs out of the bank on a daily basis. We aim to take out approximately €400 million between now and 2014 to bring our costs-to-income ratio down so that the bank will be viable. At the end of all of that, apart from having a solid pillar bank, I hope we will be in a position to repay the taxpayer because the bank would not exist without the money that has been put in through the Oireachtas by the taxpayer. However, it is one hell of a difficult journey. We are giving it our all. In fairness, we have a new team. As Dr. Somers has described, we could not get a chief executive of the bank for a long time. We had a number of chief risk officers who effectively ran out of the place. They did not want to stay. We now have a solid risk officer, a new internal auditor and a new chief operations officer. We were lucky to get David Duffy back from Singapore to work in an Irish bank. He has shown a high level of commitment to try to ensure that we put the bank back on a solid footing.