Mr. Dermot Gleeson:

Well, Chairman, I have tried to do something of that explanation in my opening remarks and I won't repeat what I said there but the bank was divided into five divisions. We had an operation in the United States, in Poland and in the UK and then in Ireland it was divided into what is called capital markets and then Republic of Ireland, which is what people would know as the traditional bank that you've described.

Four of those divisions, by and large, came through reasonably intact through the crisis. Republic of Ireland, unfortunately, became embroiled in property lending which in retrospect ran out of control, was too expansive, was not controlled by the risk models. I suppose it's fair to say that we had, and this is not an excuse, but it is an explanation ... some of the things that I am saying today may sound like excuses, I'm not making any excuses. I am trying to assist the committee by explaining how it seemed at the time. We had installed this enormously expensive ... the best personnel system of controlling risk and I think that directors thought that - and it was advertised - as a means of measuring, monitoring and managing risk and we just had excessive faith in it. Allied to that, we went too far with individual developers. The AIB philosophy at the time, and for years before, was "stick with your customer". Try and make sure they don't go anywhere else, because we had, as you said, plenty of customers and you have to remember that big developers were often customers that we'd had for maybe 25 or 30 years; people who had often started modestly as perhaps small builders and had been successful, accumulating large personnel wealth, always repaying their loans, always coming back for more and always repaying them again. And I'm afraid we took too much comfort in that history and we weren't...our credit processes were not strict and savage enough. We looked at affordability and I think we have to take the blame for having processes that just did not match the cataclysm that came. As I say, the competition was fierce. I refer again to Professor Honohan's analysis of the competition but that's another explanation, not an excuse.