Mr. John Moran:

No. I said that I considered that the job in hand was to come back to Ireland to help a situation that was under what I believed was very considerable stress.

I would have agreed with Mr. Draghi or Mr. Trichet at the time on the level of risk to the financial stability of the State. Over time, we have moved to a scenario where there is considerable stability in the system. I have a management team in which I have full faith. Issues such as mortgage debt and household debt are still very important and we need to continue to work through them in our system. We will not find a magic wand, wave it over these problems and make them disappear. Household debt in this country has decreased by €30 billion in the past four to five years. If it decreases by another €25 billion or €30 billion, we will start to get into territory that one would regard as much safer by international norms and where one would not necessarily see the same drag on domestic recovery. However, as with every household dealing with these issues, a path is found, but it takes some time to get to the destination. We are seeing all the various important indices moving in the right direction. As part of the job in hand, we have now got to a point at which we are actually looking at these issues, sharing the information with people, helping others to analyse the issues and continuing to work through them.

The mortgage arrears situation is another issue. I have been well reported - correctly in this case - as actually having identified what was a real problem back in 2011 and 2012. I referred in particular to the risks to the economy of excessive debt in households and SMEs, and the need for the banking system and others to move forward and drive towards a real resolution of the issues across the system. However, there were not systems in the banks to deal with these problems. There are now such systems in the banks. Some of them are moving faster than others but at least they are all moving in the right direction. It is now for the regulator, Mr. McCarthy and others to continue to monitor the trends and keep the pressure on. One hopes the banks' management teams and boards have also realised the importance of their keeping the pressure on so as to ultimately resolve this issue and ease some of the pressures pertaining to the domestic economy.