Mr. Brendan McDonagh:

If you are saying, Deputy, that if Anglo and Irish Nationwide effectively were nationalised ... but I mean you were still left then with AIB transferring €20 billion worth of loans to NAMA and they suffered an €11 billion loss on that transfer, and Bank of Ireland transferred roughly about €10 billion and had almost €1.5 billion loss. They're still substantial figures. I think the issue boils down to the following: the game was up. The borrowing had happened, the assets weren't worth what anybody had thought they were worth, the debtors were exploiting the lack of synergy between the banks in terms of knowing how much each was borrowing from each institution ... I still think you would probably have had to have brought them together to actually capture the surpluses of some assets to deal with the deficits in other banks.