Mr. John Moran:

The Deputy has picked up on an important point. In the speech associated with this, I make reference to how we have been approaching the problem over the past couple of years. Europe and Ireland had a particular vulnerability at the time of the impact of the crisis because so much of the economy was funded on bank balance sheets. The impact of regulatory change designed to make banks safer, which has been coming through the system thereafter, had a disproportionate impact on the European economy as a result. To answer the question on the OECD, looking at Canada and Australia and what has been happening in other countries, we find that infrastructural funding continues to be significantly funded through capital markets instruments outside the pure banking system. A bit like the US, although that is more to the other extreme, they have embraced non-bank techniques for funding growth in the various economies. We took advantage of this and were able to benefit from it in 2011 when we took the decision to accelerate the sale of the Anglo Irish Bank portfolio in the United States. It was obvious to us early in 2011 that the US had recovered to have more liquidity than Europe. That liquidity allowed us to derive a pricing benefit in respect of the sale that was not obvious here. In some respects, from that point onwards, as we think about what we have been trying to do in the banking policy area, which is one of the reasons pulling together the financial services team and the banking policy team makes more sense from our perspective, we have been trying to fix the banking system and trying to encourage funding sources that are not within the banks. A measure of success of that in Ireland, which has put us ahead of the European system, is that following the liquidation of IBRC, which was a large part of our domestic banking system, very little of the credit supplied by that bank moved to the domestic banking sector. That has allowed us, particularly in the funding of real estate projects, to move to an environment where significant funds come into our system other than through the banking system. The obligations of Basel III and other regulatory changes is that credit will be more expensive if provided by banks.