Professor Philip Lane:

That was done by AIB. I am pretty sure it was pretty small in terms of its overall balance sheet. I can see how it would have made sense from an organisational point of view. That sounds okay to me if a bank wants to concentrate on lending, rather than managing its own properties. The sale of their buildings by the banks is probably a pretty small part of the overall story. It might also indicate their private view of whether the property market was overvalued. That might also come into it. Maybe they were selling because they took the view that if they were going to be lending to the Irish property market, they did not want to be holding an Irish property as an asset as well.