Mr. John Beggs:

I'm not sure that things would be very different. I think, obviously, the funding ... the funding requirement of banks is an issue that probably should have been given more attention. I'm of the opinion that that funding would not have been available to the Irish financial sector unless external analysts and economists actually had a positive view about Ireland.

They weren't just taking their cue from what Irish banks were saying. And I think we need to be a lot more critical and sceptical about ... about trends, particularly when there is a trend in place as to how this is going to work itself out. And that is true of the soft landing issue. We never envisaged soft landing to be soft, there was a certain amount of friction going to happen in a soft landing and the soft landing we are talking about was only house prices. We had no information or very little information about what was happening in commercial property. We've done a lot of talking and analysis around housing because we had monthly statistics, we had population. When it came to the commercial side, we didn't have that information. So we were acting in a very, almost naive way in that we didn't have full information. So more information around the sector as a whole and property as a whole, not just mortgages, would make a big difference in the future.