Mr. John Moran:

Yes, it's actually an interesting question, right? It's a bit like the debt relief one we just had, right? In 2011 and 2012, and I can't really speak to what was happening in '09 and '10, right, nobody wanted to invest in Ireland, right? I mean, they wouldn't buy even the Government's debt. They most certainly weren't going to put money into the building of the infrastructure of the country, right? And our dilemma was that in order to stop freefall of the asset value, of which we were actually a very significant owner, right, we had to find a way in which we would have investors and buyers willing to come into the market to buy up Irish assets. And our banking system didn't have the capital to be able to fund that, right? We're talking about the net cost of the capital, but we most certainly would be having a different conversation if you were asking me what we would have done if we had put another €30 billion of equity into the Irish banking system in order to generate capital to be able to buy these assets, or fund people buying the assets. So our dilemma, as indeed always happens when you have a market crash like that, is you have no idea where the floor is, but what you do know is you won't find it until people are able to buy the assets and willing to buy the assets. And so the first success in the Irish recovery was proving through the course of 2011 that, unlike some other jurisdictions where they had put assets for sale but actually not sold them, that we were, in fact, going to sell the assets, because that encouraged investors to come in. Now, the irony of that ... it's actually not so much an irony; it's just actually a particular good result, is if you look at the scenario that have been said for the liquidation of IBRC, even in October 2012, I think it is, when the calculations were done, there were scenarios in which the liquidator thought he may have a deficit of €8 billion in the IBRC liquidation. Now, we had that obligation already because everything had been guaranteed through the system. So by having the assets improve across the whole country in terms of value we actually also gained because NAMA's asset value went up, and the IBRC value went up. And the other thing I would say which was in question - and I'm going to tread carefully here because I don't want to step into the commission of inquiry issue, but it's an important, sort of, system-wide thing - we had to sell assets across the world that, actually, if we had held them on for four or five years we would have made a bigger profit, right?

But our choice in terms of the advice to a Government was:

Do you want your capital invested in assets in the United States or in Poland or elsewhere? You might make money, which might help pay some of the, you know, the funding of the State, or do you actually want to invest the available capital you have, in Ireland, by building schools and hospitals in Ireland, or do you want to be a real estate player in the United States?

And that's the choice, right, so the choice when you're faced with a recovery mission that we had to do, was we ended up owning an awful lot of assets, an awful lot of banks, that we didn't actually, as a Government, really want to own. And our choice was, how do we release the capital-----