Mr. Terence O'Rourke:

That's a very good question, but that very point, that those things do lead to crashes, is not ... was one that was not seen by the IMF, by the OECD, by the ESRI, by the Central Bank and by the auditors. None of us saw that. And why is it? One of the other issues of bubbles is that people always are able to rationalise it. I went to many discussions by prominent and eminent economists who told us why the Irish economy was going to go to a soft landing and would not be heading into crash because there were demographics, because of our FDI and for lots of other reasons why the Irish economy would be okay. And that was ... we looked for the best evidence, and that's our job, as auditors, to get the best evidence we can with the experts. We're not economists, we're auditors, we're are applying rules and we need to take the best evidence we can and the best evidence we can was that ... that there was a risk, and everybody ... we identified the risk - if property prices decline there will be big loss in the banks. We said that and the issue for us was ... for management, have they assessed whether that risk is likely or not and, for us, have they properly reflected the likelihood of that risk. And the best evidence we had was that they had properly assessed the likelihood of that risk.