Mr. Richie Boucher:

I understand the Deputy's point but there are a couple of things to say. We will come back to him with more detail, particularly about the capital. As we identified in slide 2 - as a public company, any announcements I make must be made publicly and verified - we have a similar sized mortgage book in the UK to Ireland. They are roughly €26 billion to €27 billion. The exchange rate will have an effect but they are roughly of similar size. We have different product offers and fixed rates and a SVR or base rate concept in the UK as well as in Ireland. Trying to look at a comparable product, which is a variable rate product, where the rate can be adjusted at the bank's discretion, in the second half of last year, our charge rate to the customer in our UK business for our variable rate mortgages was, across all of the variable rate offers - because we have different variable rate offers in Ireland - 4.49% whereas for our Irish book it was 4.3%. As such, there is a slight misnomer that our charge rate is different in Ireland to the UK. We compete aggressively in Ireland and the UK.

To come to a couple of the other points, I could not put my hand on my heart and say we suffer higher direct regulatory costs on our UK or Irish business. Much of the servicing for our UK mortgages is done out of centres we have in Kilkenny and, as such, that provides employment in Ireland. Wage rates are not hugely different between our Irish and UK businesses, broadly speaking. The big difference between our Irish and UK business in mortgages is the historic loss experience, which has been considerable. We have had to have provision charges over the last six years of roughly €1.1 billion on our Irish mortgage book whereas it has been roughly €150 million in the UK. One has to build that into one's capital both for existing and new business. The big difference is the loss experience, which comes into one's capital charge, and also the anticipation of the time to recovery where a customer defaults. The time to recovery is dramatically different in our UK and Irish businesses. I will come back with a more detailed explanation to the Deputy.