Professor Patrick Honohan:

I would clarify that point as well. By ... if I'm not mistaken, by November of 2009 NAMA had had one go at valuing one loan with one bank. So this was a sort of pilot exercise and it came out at a discount much higher than the bank itself acknowledged ... or they felt it was wrong and they certainly didn't want them to extrapolate on this basis and they called me in a panic saying "Oh no, you've got to do something about this, we can't be heading into this risky territory." So already there, there were warning bells that the valuations could be much worse than the banks were saying.