Mr. Michael Buckley:

If I could start in 2002, Chairman. My first big interaction with the Central Bank in its prudential role was in 2002 when we had the Allfirst fraud. As you can see, it has marked my recall of my whole time as CEO, but there I found .... what happened at the stage was that we had to deal with a whole lot of regulatory intervention from the Federal Reserve in New York because, remember the fraud had happened in a US-regulated bank with a subsidiary of ours and the local regulator, and what I found was that there was a very professional, very thorough approach adopted by both of the regulators. They worked together, very closely, we had to sign up a memorandum of understanding, we had to undertake a very detailed programme of remedial action. That programme was given oversight by a man called John Hyman, who had been the previous controller ... one of the previous controllers of the currency in the USA. So, and we worked our way very thoroughly. I put one of my most senior executives full time on making sure we met all the requirements. So, in that case I found the regulator acting, if you like, in its prudential mode, behaved very professionally.

The second thing, I'd say, and I am sorry if I'm taking too long but I just want to give you a balanced account. In the FX charges and related issues that came up during 2003-04 which Deputy O'Donnell has already referred to, I found that the regulator which at this stage was on the conduct side, the customer side of it, was very proactive, was very demanding, rightly, as I would say. And again, I found that we got into that way of independent investigation, independent oversight, we had a former Comptroller and Auditor General involved, we had a former Governor of the Central Bank involved. And I found that that relationship was properly demanding from the regulator.

Now, other than those two big crisis events, I would have interacted with the regulator ... and other than the meeting that you mentioned in the beginning ... I would have interacted with the regulator a couple of times a year when our interim results were coming out and when our annual results were coming out, the process was that myself and my finance director would go in the day before, before we made the market announcement, into the Central Bank and have a meeting with the prudential side of the Central Bank. We would present our results to them, they were ... if you like ... we were open to any questions they would ask us and I suppose my recall of those meetings is that ... and I think I mentioned this in my written statement, that they weren't very demanding, they weren't very probing. So, they are my three bits-----