Mr. John Beggs:

I would say in the absence of the liquidity crisis, the Irish economy banking system would have reached a point where ... we would have reached a limit as to ... some sort of a limit on as to external funding. I mean this was a big source of funds, rating agencies had become concerned about the ... the amount of external funding in comparison with peer banks. And that would have put it ... started to put a lid on it. As I said earlier, the question is whether the soft landing would have been quite as soft as we envisaged ... but I think that in the absence of that we would have managed ... we would have managed through. But it would have been with some cost of an adjustment in the housing sector, property sector. We were always working on the basis that the weak export sector, which other people believed that our export performance was impaired by our focus on property, that that would have improved and given its weight in the economy, on a statistical basis, might have offset some of the worst effects of any ... even soft landing adjustment in property.