Mr. Paul Dobey:

-----because the environment was contracting. I mean if you look at what happened in late 2008 and early 2009, there was a huge contraction in the economy. We had Lehman's, we had the TARP, we had the guarantee, we had foreign markets froze, we had secret loans - if I can put it that way - in the UK, we had ... there was bank mergers every ... in Europe and in the US. We were in hugely uncertain times and trying - and I could take you through the economic forecasts that were there at the time and what ultimately transpired - we were trying to assess in a very, very difficult time, the loan loss provisions for AIB.

That involved a huge amount of work, and we kept going until we got to the very end, and we were absolutely comfortable when we got to the end, because if we didn't ... if we weren't absolutely comfortable, we wouldn't have signed the audit opinion.