Mr. Paul Dobey:

Absolutely we would have, I mean we would get together as banking financial services partners regularly and discuss various best practice. One of the things, I'm not an expert in Spanish law, but it's different than Irish law. So when the EU ... IFRS regulation was brought into Irish law it was brought in fully with no carve-outs, and we didn't have the option of having that carve-out that was available in Irish law, sorry, that was available in Spanish law, and I have to say I don't understand all the details around Spanish law. I can say that the audit firms in Spain qualified the accounts of the Spanish banks to say that they were not in compliance with IFRS. Now for AIB, given that it had access to ... European capital markets and US capital markets, it wanted to apply IFRS and wanted that opinion from its auditors and the market would have demanded its opinion from its auditors in relation to IFRS.

The other thing I can say is while what was called dynamic provisioning was operated in Spain, it was only operated in relation to a small portion of its book and it was there for a particular reason, which I think was to do with holdings that Spanish banks held in Spanish companies. And,all I can say as an observation is that the additional provisions that were set aside as a result of that were, were not sufficient to save the Spanish banks from the, the, the ... very significant issues that they faced.