Mr. Klaus Regling:

Of course one had both. One had the housing bubble as such - real estate - and when we talk sometimes about the obsession of the Irish public with real estate I think we refer to that.

People really thought prices would never fall because the collective memory did not exist, unlike in the UK for instance where people know that once in a generation there is a crisis in the housing market and prices drop by 10%, 20% or 30%. This collective memory did not exist here, so people thought it would always go up and the investment could not go wrong. That relates I think to real estate. On the property side, our research suggests that economically it is a more serious issue. Data were quoted from Peter Nyberg's report. He did his report about a year later so we did not look into that in that detail. I take it that these numbers are the right ones but we did not work on those ourselves. Economically, this misdirection of capital hit the Irish economy even more than the housing bubble because it seems that a lot of investment took place that was never really viable and will never be viable in the future. It is a real loss, and that is quite different from real estate where we see already that prices are recovering.