Mr. Donal Forde:

If I can just step back a bit for context, I guess we were very conscious that the value of houses had become inflated. I think our difficulty, and I now accept that mistake, but our difficulty was that we did not see that changing dramatically because the view we had was that we were in an environment where there was a shortage of housing stock ... in the capital at least, in the greater Dublin area. Probably still the case today. We had an influx of people coming into the country from eastern Europe and so forth. We had a demographic where the baby boomers of the 80s were coming into house. So you had a scenario and you had - the outlook, it seemed, was one for continued economic expansion. We did not see how it was that there was going to be a significant change in the fact that houses were going to be more expensive and going to demand more of the proportion of disposable income to service them. We sort of accepted that. For that reason then, the shift in the model, I suppose, looking more at the capacity of the borrower to be able to meet the repayments even if interest rates rose became more the issue, rather than a concern about the inflated value of the house. I am not justifying our approach now in hindsight, but I am trying to rationalise the way we were thinking at the time.