Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I will not pursue it further. However, I draw from that response that given everything that happened, if other banks are likely to have a similar concern about going down that road again, the current housing crisis will not be resolved - at least alone - by the finance that might be provided by the banking system in this country and that we are going to have to look elsewhere.

I understand Mr. Brown was not involved in Siteserv but if I may pursue the question I put to Mr. Brown about Siteserv-type scenarios. If I understand him correctly he said that he cannot imagine a situation where a commercial loan of €150 million would be written down by €110 million where that company would continue in business. I think that is what Mr. Bell said. If I understand him correctly, Mr. Brown followed on from that to say that he cannot envisage circumstances where such a company that was being sold off that the shareholders would be allowed walk away with €5 million. That is fairly damning opinion in terms of what happened in Siteserv, even if Mr. Brown is being moderate in his statement of it. I have one further question for Mr. Brown in the Siteserv case scenario. Can he envisage a situation of that sort where the buyer of the company that is being sold off was somebody who also had a number of other companies that between them had a controlling share in a number of other companies and, between them, owed Mr. Brown's bank hundreds of millions of euro in other arrangements and that he would offer a write-down of that sort in that kind of arrangement?