Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

Yes, and the evidence is that there was a heavy concentration of property lending as part of that growth. But can I put to you then what Governor Honohan of the Central Bank said in relation to this type of growth:

A very simple warning sign used by most regulators to identify a bank exposed to increased risk is rapid balance sheet growth. An annual growth rate of 20% is often taken as a trigger. Each of the locally controlled banks had at least one year in which this threshold was triggered. One of them Anglo crossed it eight out of nine years and indeed this average annual growth rate was 36% from 1998 to 2007.

And other witnesses here reference alarm at that level of growth. Were you alarmed by the level of growth in the banks that you were dealing with, of their lending? And, indeed, had you any worries about your own amount of exposure?