Mr. John McDonnell:

Senator, we're the only firm in Ireland that have a dedicated banking practice as opposed to a dedicated financial services practice. So when you arrive into PwC on day 1 and you join the banking practice, you only work on banking audits, so the full audit team that we would have directed to Bank of Ireland was from our banking practice and they would have all had banking experience commensurate with the period of time they were in the firm.

Secondly, we were very conscious that Bank of Ireland is organised on a divisional basis, so we would have taken our retail banking specialists to audit the retail part of Bank of Ireland, we would have taken our corporate banking specialists to audit the corporate side of Bank of Ireland and our treasury specialist to audit the treasury side of Bank of Ireland. In terms of mobilising for the audit, we would have had specific Bank of Ireland structured training at the start of every year where we would look at the key risks and significant risks with Bank of Ireland and ensure the team were up to speed on those.

But also, as a banking practice, we would have detailed, banking-specific training over and above the training everybody else in the firm gets before we enter into a cycle of banking audits. That training would deal with three aspects. The first aspect would be accounting training: any changes in the accounting that has particular relevance to banking and that would have been very heavily focused on accounting for financial instruments and impairment. Two, any auditing training and that would have had two focuses, Senator. The first is any changes in auditing standards that we need to take into account but also re-emphasising aspects of auditing standards that maybe ... that we need to focus in on as the business environment changes and particularly in that aspect, it would have been how one audits impairment and how one audits an incurred loss model on impairment, and thirdly, particular training around the current business environment in which the financial institutions are operating. And that would have been, as you would expect, a heavy focus on training around credit, accounting for credit, the auditing of credit and as part of that training, we would have been discussing the impact of the credit crisis on the property markets and we would have had auctioneers coming into us to give us their perspectives on the property crisis etc.