Mr. Brendan McDonagh:

Deputy, if I may just add, there is one thing I am absolutely sure about. The ECB is very accommodating at present. It's providing lots of liquidity into the system and it's taking different types of collateral now. Back in 2008 and 2009, the ECB was not very accommodative. It did not want land and development loans from Irish banks as collateral to advance money to the Irish banks and system. The whole rationale for NAMA was to take the land and development loans which the ECB did not want, put them into NAMA, NAMA issued Government-guaranteed bonds, the banks could bring these Government-guaranteed bonds to the ECB, and the ECB was happy to give them money on the back of this mechanism. The banks lost, if you look at the Central Bank figures that have been published on an ongoing basis through the years, the banks lost about €100 billion worth of liquidity during the crisis. We gave them €30 billion of assets that they could use to replenish that liquidity. If they still had the land and development assets, they wouldn't have that €30 billion liquidity and the situation would be a whole lot worse, I would suggest.