Mr. Richie Boucher:

On accounting write-offs, at the end of June the amounts written off for residential mortgages, which includes our Irish and UK mortgage books - the vast majority would relate to our UK mortgage business - was €20 million. That is from an accounting write-off point of view, the sale of the collateral and the completion of the other processes to maximise the recovery. For non-property SME and corporate, the figure was €114 million. For property and construction, the figure was €51 million. For consumer credit, the figure was €45 million. That makes accounting write-offs of €230 million for the six months to the end of June.

For the branches, we may be counter-intuitive. We believe that we have done the raising of the capital, the restructuring of our balance sheet and the reduction in our costs. We have a huge focus on the generation of revenue. We are investing heavily in e-banking, mobile banking and our infrastructure. However, we believe the branch is a very important way for us to engage with our customers. We have 250 branches. I cannot say whether next week we will have 249 and the following week 251. That is our broad idea of our footprint. Obviously, we write to our customers. In certain city centre locations we have done branch consolidations. There are other issues to do with the building but we closed our branch in Donnybrook and amalgamated it with the branch in Ranelagh. Those two branches were located approximately 1 km from each other. We recently opened two branches at Dublin City University, DCU, and Dublin Airport. We have plans to open further branches but this is a commercially sensitive matter because we are involved in negotiations either with landlords or over location. We will be opening further branches where we see the population is moving. We see the branches as an extremely important part of our engagement with customers.