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

Go raibh maith agat agus cuirim fáilte roimh an tUasal Regling chuig an coiste. I wanted to start by looking at the area of commercial property. Reading Mr. Regling's report, one of the things that strikes me is that he emphasises time and time again the role that commercial lending, commercial property played and the concentration. There has been a narrative there and indeed I think some of the comments he has made play into that narrative, where he talks about the national obsession that people had with property. We had our own Taoiseach in Davos saying that we went mad borrowing and so on.

Can Mr. Regling talk about the role commercial property played in that? The information we now have from the Nyberg report suggests that 50% of the Irish loan book of Anglo belonged to 20 individuals, 51% of the loan book of Irish Nationwide was made up of 25 individuals and 190 borrowers made up €62 billion of debt. When we talk about the property bubble and the crisis here, was it essentially a commercial property bubble and was it essentially a small number of individuals?