Mr. John Moran:

What I didn't realise was that Fiona was going to make her speech right after me as well, on the same day, in broadly, the same space, which was useful because it meant that both the regulator and indeed, the shareholder, were saying that without debt relief, you were not going to get the economy to work. And she had come at it, perhaps, from a slightly different perspective. Our perspective was exactly what I think actually people wanted us to do - which was we were looking at the balance of interest and we were saying that the classic problem we now had in Ireland was an excessive debt problem. And as long as you had that - whether you had it in households which wouldn't be spending, whether you had it in companies which couldn't grow - the banks needed to actually solve the excess debt problem of their customers. Not just because we wanted to give away the taxpayers' money, but because, by doing so, the economy could start working again. And, guess what, with the economy working, it was actually in the interest of the banks, because their profits would start growing as well.