Mr. Ger Mitchell:

It is important for people to understand that there is no direct binary link between the European Central Bank's lending rate and the cost of funds which is attributable to each bank. The source of funding for any retail bank will be a mixture of retail depositor funds, commercial and wholesale deposits, treasury instruments and system funding. The blended cost of these funds to Permanent TSB is just north of 1.7% or 170 basis points, while the ECB rate is at 15 basis points. It is important to bear this in mind. The second point to make is that over the course of the past two years we have reduced our standard variable rate by 119 basis points at a time when others have increased. The third point is that our net interest margin for the group is at 88 basis points, which does not leave an awful lot of headroom in the relationship. It is important to bear these three things in mind.