Mr. Brian Cowen:

I was making the point that these processes of going in and having a, sort of, a sample of loans, and trying to work out from that what the likely overall situation is, depends on, in many cases, the accuracy of management information too, and if you want to have an absolute understanding of every single loan in every bank that was problematic, you had to go the NAMA route; that's the truth of it, because sometimes you might have had a performing loan, or a reasonably performing loan, and you might have a security underlying it that was defective. So, therefore, when it came to getting that loan sorted out, you hadn't the legal wherewithal to do it because the various legal niceties hadn't been observed.

So there might be another loan where it's non-performing but you can get paid because the security is good. So you've got to actually to get into this thing on a micro level. The point is regarding our regulatory system, we now have a far more intrusive one. I've read ... or I've read where Mr. Elderfield, I understand, is going to be submitting his proposals to you. You know, the experience of people like that, I'm sure, will be helpful to the committee in coming with recommendations that build on the improvements we've seen thus far.