Pearse Doherty (Donegal South West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I will move on to the main issues set out in the document Mr. Nyberg has presented. He has helpfully set out eight bullet points, six of which are conditions that are necessary for a systemic financial crisis to occur. The first factor is that there must be "a sufficiently large number of households and investors who, at some point, start making serious mistakes in judging the value and liquidity of their major assets, holdings and projects". Mr. Nyberg remarked earlier that the borrower must share the blame with the lender. The view has been put forward by some in this State that we all partied and all bear guilt for what went on before the financial crisis. The first bullet point could be seen as giving succour to that view.

Will Mr. Nyberg elaborate on that point with particular reference to the statement, on page 32 of his document, that the top 20 customers of Anglo Irish Bank had loans in the region of €21 billion, and the value of loans to the top 25 customers of Irish Nationwide represented 51% of that institution's commercial book? Mr. Brendan McDonagh of the National Asset Management Agency gave evidence to the inquiry that 190 borrowers taken on board by the agency had collective debts of €62 billion. Given those facts, how can we say that a financial crisis required certain behaviours by a large number of household borrowers?