Mr. William Beausang:

I think you have to bring it back to the way in which those rules were implemented. We put in place those rules, that was our job. As I outlined in my witness statement and in my overview, we took, as far as prudential regulations were concerned, consumer protection legislation was done and it was obviously a domestic initiative but we took these models of financial regulation. They were carefully worked through by experts in Brussels, committees of financial supervisors, significant consultation with industry. We took those models, having negotiated those models and those models had been agreed by all member states and put them in place. It was then the responsibility of the Financial Regulator to implement the regulation and to supervise the banks in the manner that those regulations suggested. So the contrast that is often drawn is between the approach taken in Ireland and let's say the approach taken in Spain. Although I couldn't say this definitively, in broad terms they were operating the same framework, they were operating the same pan-EU framework of financial regulation. Of course they had their own difficulties in Spain eventually but the Spanish regulator is seen and the Spanish central bank is seen to have been more intrusive and having people on the ground in the banks rather than as occurred in Ireland. So that is the conclusion I would come to as to why things were disproportionately worse here. Apart from the conduct of the banks which is a separate issue there were significant supervisory failures as documented in Nyberg and as documented in the Honohan report.