Mr. Gerry Fitzpatrick:

No that's fine but they weren't all interconnected so if you take a single issue, and clearly the concern would be if they were interconnected you would say, "Is there a flaw in the overall attitude to control in this organisation?" If we take the most recent one which was the 2006 Dublin mortgage centre issue which then had an internal audit report at that time and then proceeded into another internal audit report, my concern was always to say well actually how has this issue affecting the measurement of loans given within the organisation, so my understanding would be to understand how they were responding to the regulator's concerns. So the regulator in that case had a letter some time in 2007 which was referred to in Mr. McCarthy's evidence. And clearly I would want to understand how they were responding to that issue because obviously I would be concerned in relation to some of those elements also.

In relation to the method of engagement with the regulator, I wouldn't have been there when those queries were being shared with the regulator. I certainly saw subsequently that, you know, the provisioning information perhaps hadn't been strong because actually a lot of the queries appear to be ... as a recall, being responded to by information being provided. Now whether that was because of the mechanics of the process or Ulster Bank's process of providing that information, it didn't seem to be a very well organised on both sides inspection.

But my concern was to see were those issues being closed down. So yes if loans had been processed with a control weakness was that an isolated incident or was that wholesale and could that have an impact on the actual properly, proper recording of loans? And then lastly if loans were given and the process in the mortgage centre wasn't identifying impairment because people were maybe not paying on loans and maybe the system didn't allow Ulster Bank to understand that, that would be a concern I would have. So it wasn't because I could see they were rectifying those issues so they had arrears because maybe things hadn't been processed well but they were closing them down and I don't believe from my understanding and my recollection of the 2007 audit there was material loss associated with the Dublin mortgage centre. There had been a lot of operational mismanagement that they were correcting but it didn't have financial loss and therefore didn't require loans to be written off because they had been given in an inappropriate way.