Mr. Donal Forde:

Let me try and rationalise the thinking that was going on at the time, and it's this. If you can imagine ... earlier on I described I suppose a simple loan project where someone, a developer, has to buy land and go through that long period during which they pay for the land, they develop the housing stock and then they sell it. Through all that time there is no revenue whatsoever to be got. If you are dealing with a larger player that has a number of these projects afoot at one time, they tend to be at different stages of maturity so typically you'll have some projects that are closer to revenue and sales than others. That helps to make the loan a more manageable proposal from the lender's viewpoint. So the principle of working with a more diversified player that has experience and a track record in building houses on time and within budget, that stands. What fell down here was that there was such a collapse of economic activity that every element of these different businesses - whether they were involved in residential development or whether they were involved in commercial development - all of them simply weren't able to produce revenue and that logic became completely unstuck. So I am in a sense defending the principle of working with a diversified player in any industry. But it afforded us no protection here in the way things developed, as we imagined it would.