Mr. David Duffy:

I think there was an element of exceptionality around it. It's a once in a generation circumstance where the availability of a huge amount of liquidity including retail bank liquidity which wasn't available before in the sense that it was made available as well as geopolitical events where China in order to grow was very much a supporter of a cheap cost of capital through its purchasing of US debt despite the overall levels of debt.

That meant that the US consumer became very heavily indebted and that was a contributor to the property boom. So there were many macro or geopolitical events that were fuelling cheap funding and property escalation of pricing. With that there was also a light regulatory universe which ... of all of the asset classes in property many of which were sub-prime, they were packaged and securitised, distributed around the world with a mix of good and bad assets in those packages. And rating agencies on top of that were rating the majority of these triple A. So, bad risk was distributed globally with a high rating. I don't think in history there has ever been a confluence of events around the scale of cheap money and the distribution of risk and the unknown element of risk contained in the securitisations. That cheap money was allowing every market to chase property and when it collapsed in the sub-prime and then was further influenced by allowing banks to go bankrupt in the US, there were many more banks were very close to going bankrupt. So the extraordinary measures of the US Government at the time, both negative and positive, if you put all of those together, it is an exceptional period of time. Ireland's problem was that we were very badly positioned to react to that given our concentration.