Mr. Pat McArdle:

The mortgage, per se, if you just had a ... we'd stressed for mortgages don't forget for higher ... for 56% real fall if I recall rightly and the bank obviously decided it could live with it. I didn't do it so I don't know, and I never heard the results but they were presumably reported up the bank. Well I might not of heard of it ... whether they could live with it I don't know. But let's assume that it was okay because no one ever reported these stress tests were going to cause any Irish banks to collapse, you know, we never got any inkling of that. So the banks, some banks anyway, Ulster Bank had stress tested for very significant house price falls and there was no problem.

The problem was in the commercial mortgage book. And why was the problem there was the second question. I think it's because of the cross borrowings, right ... in that I think they only became... well two things. first of all. The process by which NAMA did it, that two-year process, that caused Irish property values to go down. We'd have never ... if we had been able to do it like the Americans did - virtually overnight and stuff the banks with capital - we might have got away with ... instead of 67%, with a much lower fall. But I'm not going to go there because that's speculation and we'll never know the answer. But what we do know, and what should be available to the authorities is, the cross borrowing that all these big developers, you know, 20 of them, it turned out, that borrowed from all the banks. Now, that wasn't known to me and I suspect it wasn't known to the banks either. So I think that was a key factor.