Mr. Cormac McCarthy:

We spoke to the Minister and his staff in the Department of Finance a number of times over the coming month. You may recall on 13 October, as it happened, Royal Bank of Scotland, along with other banks in the United Kingdom, were bailed out by the UK Government, so our immediate stress was resolved by that. But we still were experiencing, you know, challenges around deposit ... about deposit losses, so we worked with the Department of Finance over a period of months to try to see if we could avail of the benefit of the guarantee. And, sometime in October we got to a point where the requirements that the guarantee would have had for the group, not just Ulster Bank, RBS as a whole, would have meant it was impossible for us to join the guarantee. So we declined the opportunity.