Mr. John McDonnell:

I think, Chairman, you have to look at what our role is. Our role ... and I know I'm repeating myself, but it's really important. Our role is to give an opinion on the financial statements. The financial statements ... the purpose of financial statements is to faithfully represent the past. A set of financial statements ... the bank enter into transactions, those transactions have an impact on the balance sheet, we give an opinion as to whether those transactions have been properly accounted for. It is not our role ... and there's been a lot of debate about this through the crisis and after the crisis. It's accepted that it was not our role at that point in time to give an opinion on the business model of the bank. That's the role of management. And very importantly here, our role as auditors are governed by the independence rules, and the independence rules say that we cannot get involved in management activities. So, we're not ... we can't get involved in the setting of the bank's business strategy. We can't get involved in the determination of whether it's right or wrong. That's for the purpose of management. Even the monitoring of the lending strategy is a management role. We have to be very, very careful that we don't cross that line or we cease to be independent. So thereby we focus in on what we were asked to do, and what we were asked to do under legislation and our letter of engagement with Bank of Ireland was to talk about whether transactions had been properly accounted for in the financial statements and whether impairment on those transactions were properly reflected in the accounting statement.

The impact of business model on future risks and the impact of business model on the future profitability of the bank is something for management, and I think ... that expectation gap I know is there, but that's what we did.