Mr. Kevin Cardiff:

Yes, that was, in part, their viewpoint at least. The idea was to deleverage the sector and to have a couple of pillar banks.

The place where there is the most disagreement, if you like, was on ILP, where some parts of the troika wanted to wind it up on the basis that, look, it was hanging out there and it was a bit vulnerable, and, you know, let's be a bit macho now and just close it down. And others were saying, well, like ... for example, the competition people in the European Commission were saying, "But hang on now, we're here, we're supposed to protect competition, and if you do that you only have two banks in ... each with a huge retail franchise in Ireland, so let's keep it going." And we were towards that side. But since ... since ... so we didn't have to fight too hard since they were fighting with each other on that particular point, so ILP survived in part, despite the advice of some parts of the troika, and ... even in the ... because I was interviewed recently by the IMF evaluators, evaluating their own programme, and they were ... this was one of the points they were focusing on. Shouldn't we really have got rid of ILP? So those kinds of discussions did happen, yes.